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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

IGS: Current and Recent Graduate Research

Jeremy Brice

Knowing wine: (dis)connections in knowledges and markets

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Academic Profile

Jeremy holds a first class BSc (Hons) in Human Sciences and an MSc with distinction in Development Anthropology, both from the University of Durham. He also achieved a distinction in his MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy, which he studied in the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford. Jeremy is currently a DPhil student in the School of Geography and the Environment, pursuing doctoral research funded through an ESRC 1+3 grant.

Jeremy's academic background involves both biological and social anthropology, and his research interests centre on perspectives such as actor-network-theory and posthumanism which question the boundaries between the human and the non-human, and between the social and the material. His current research explores how the interweaving of bio-material and socio-political processes contributes to the construction and conduct of commercial life.

Current Research

Jeremy's doctoral research investigates how multiple biological and economic rhythms interact within the global wine trade. During 2010-11 he undertook ethnographic fieldwork among South Australian grape and wine producers, exploring how the material complexities of wine production influence the socio-economic ordering of the Australian wine industry. Jeremy has become especially interested in how wine producers' close engagements with the biological rhythms of grape vines and micro-organisms affect their orientations to time, and in how the temporalities of wine production differ from those of global wine markets.

Jeremy's research examines how wine producers and traders deal with temporal and commercial incongruities among the heterogeneous communities of life forms, materials and practices involved in producing and circulating wine. His work pays particular attention to the uncertainties and tensions which arise from this entangled world's tendency to exceed human comprehension and control. In providing a materials-focused account of Australia's ongoing wine oversupply crisis and its socio-political implications, Jeremy's research aims to analyse the ubiquitous influence of non-human life forms on processes of globalization.