Karen Lesley Lane

Karen Lane’s ethnographic research in 2014 was in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and with ex-pats from Belfast living in London. She is interested in exploring to what extent people’s ordinary and everyday lives transcend the Troubles, the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998, and how geographical and temporal distance affects those representations. The Troubles have, to a large extent, become a defining discursive feature of representations of the city, including academic analysis. Meanwhile, anthropology has traditionally accorded less epistemological weight to fleeting and superficial encounters with strangers, but this mode of sociality is a central feature of life in the city, relationships that the modern stranger navigates with relative ease. Lane explores these research interests through a wide variety of methods and analytical tropes: storytelling, theatre, flâneurie, using fictional literature as ethnographic data, and human-animal interactions. Lane developed an innovative research method where her dog, Torridon, worked as her research assistant, increasing engagements with strangers and prompting stories that otherwise would not be told, or told so easily, to an anthropologist alone.

Lane's teaching interests are in urban anthropology and in employing sensory and experiental teaching and learning methods.

Module convenor and lecturer  MA Combined Studies

• SA1901 Introduction to Anthropology

• SA2901 Today's World

• SA3902 Global Social Issues

• SA3903 City Life: From Ur to Athens to Motown

Module convenor and lecturer MA Social Anthropology

• SA3071 Anthropology of the City: From Ur to Urban Hip Hop

Lecturer First Chances Fife Summer School

Lecturer Student Academic Experience Course Summer School 

Office hours by appointment (best via email), Room 48, School 5

Urban anthropology; anthrozoology; anthropology of performance, literature and the senses