Dr Elisa Tamburo

Elisa is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow jointly at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford and at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. She is a social anthropologist with expertise in urban and environmental anthropology in Greater China and East Africa. Between 2020-2022 she was Postdoctoral Research Associate on an ERC-funded project (Cosmological Visionaries) at King's College London.

Elisa completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, with a dissertation titled 'Moving house: place, identity and the politics of relocation in urban Taiwan'. Based on 18 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork, it investigated the relocation of a historical, diasporic settlement built by the Chinese Nationalist government after its exile to Taiwan in 1949 - a military dependents' village (juancun) - to high-rise apartment blocks and explored the ways in which three generations of Mainlanders negotiate their political identity, belonging, and practices of everyday life in the aftermath of urban displacement. Themes emerging from this work include displacement, resettlement and belonging; the political economy of planning, housing, and infrastructure; time, futurity, and the politics of history; the politics of conservation and heritage-making. Her doctoral thesis is currently being reworked into a book manuscript.

During her PhD, Elisa has been a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. Previously, she has been a Permanent Research Fellow at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT), and a Visiting Associate in the department of Sociology at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.

Her current research "URBANEG - Negotiating the City: Urban planning and dwelling amidst China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya" investigates practices of planning and dwelling in Nairobi, Kenya, vis à vis infrastructure funded and built by Chinese actors. It investigates the negotiations taking place in the city among actors across scales of analysis - the 'producers' of infrastructure at the institutional level and the 'users' at the grassroots. The objectives of the research are twofold:

1. First, to illustrate the ways in which China-funded infrastructure is shaping the planning of Nairobi as a city. In this regard, it will consider which visions of development and models of urban governance - including patterns of inclusion and exclusion - it promotes. It aims to assess to what extent the transnationalization of urban expertise is promoting a new form of urban governance and a new order in urban Kenya against the backdrop of the promises of infrastructural development.
2. Second, I will show the ways in which recipients, in particular city dwellers, old and new, are espousing, appropriating, or contesting these models of urban planning according to their dwelling practices, future aspirations, and visions of development, while assessing emerging possibilities of mobilization. Some of the questions I ask include: How does Chinese-led urban infrastructure affect the dwelling practices of its inhabitants, Kenyan and Chinese? How are these projects accepted, negotiated, or contested in view of city dwellers' aspirations and expectations? Traditionally states have deployed public works to control economic growth and labour, yet, infrastructure has also been used as an instrument of governmentality, to reinforce nationalism, as well as a political tool to generate electoral support. Thus, this line of inquiry synthesizes concerns over distribution and the governance of difference typical of urban anthropology with contemporary debates on infrastructure as sites of enchantment, nation-building, and citizenship.

Selected grants and prizes

• 2022 - Horizon Europe MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2021 (EUR 289,178.39)
• 2022 - King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities Career Development Grant (£1,500)
• 2021 - King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities Career Development Grant (£1,500)
• 2021 - European Commission Seal of Excellence
• 2020 - British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (£ 10,000). (Awarded and declined to continue ERC project)
• 2018-2019 - Teach at Tübingen Fellowship (German Excellenz Initiative)
• 2017-2018 - Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
• 2017-2018 - European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) Library Grant
• 2014-2017 - European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan Fellowship (CCKF-ERCCT)
• 2014-2015 - Taiwan Fellowship (awarded and declined to accept the ERCCT grant)
• 2013-2104 - Confucius Institute Joint PhD Scholarship
• 2013-2014 - French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) Fieldwork Grant
• 2012-2018 - SOAS Doctoral Scholarship

Elisa is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Between 2017 and 2020 she taught as a Teaching Fellow of undergraduate and graduate courses in Social Anthropology, Qualitative Research Methods, and Migration and Diaspora both at SOAS, University of London and UCL. In 2018, she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, where, as a Junior Lecturer, she convened the seminars "Urban Anthropology" and "The Anthropology of Infrastructure".