Professor Thomas Yarrow

Biography	My research has various strands, all grounded in the method of ethnography. This involves a commitment to knowing through deep and long-term immersion in other social worlds. My work aims to capture these everyday lived realities and uses these perspectives to think through broader conceptual and practical problems. Across a range of projects and publications, I have developed enduring interests in the social significance of the past, the nature and role of ‘expertise’, and the dialectics between conservation and development that are central to modern understandings of time as a form of ‘progress’. Most of my recent research focuses on the social significance of the past. I am particularly interested in the ways that memory, history, nostalgia and memorialisation arise from twenty-first century concerns, including increasing economic precarity, political dis-affection and the growing sense of climate emergency. Through various projects, in the UK and Ghana, I have shown how orientations to the past reflect present senses of loss, uncertainty or threat and help people to imagine their lives in relation to these predicaments. My most recent research focuses on steam enthusiasm, using this as a lens to explore bigger questions about the politics of nostalgia in twenty-first century Britain. Similar issues of memory and identity are also central to a major collaborative project, exploring the contemporary significance of Iron Age and Roman heritage in the UK (AHRC funded). Alongside this, I have conducted research focusing on the construction of the historic environment as a material and symbolic object of interest. These issues were examined through ethnographic research based at the national heritage agency, Historic Environment Scotland (British Academy funded) and through a project on the effects of conservation science on understandings of historic value and significance of historic monuments (AHRC funded). They were also central to a project on the tensions between heritage conservation and energy conservation in the built environment (EPSRC and AHRC funded). An earlier strand of my research examined ‘development’ as an idea that sustains multiple and conflicting practices. Research on the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana, (Leverhulme Trust funded) focused on the materialisation of ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ and how these ideas are embedded in the everyday lives of resettlers. Research on Ghanaian NGOs, looked at the social relations and practices through which they pursue various forms of social action (Development Beyond Politics, Palgrave Macmillan). The theoretical significance of this work lies in its challenge to the political reductionism of prevailing development scholarship, and the ‘Afro-pessimism’ of wider social theory pertaining to the post-colonial state in Africa. Across my research on heritage and development, a key aim has been to better understand the practices and social relations through which expert knowledge is produced and the institutional contexts in which it circulates. Collectively these help to show how different kinds of expertise are linked to interventions that profoundly shape the material, historic and built environments we all inhabit.
Research Interests	Heritage and the politics of the past Memory, nostalgia and time Conservation Architecture and the social construction of built environment Energy and climate change NGOs and Civil Society Development knowledge and practice Activism Space and Place Expert knowledge Bureaucracy and Organisations Intersections between Archaeology and Anthropology Regional specialisms in the UK and West Africa

Biography

My research has various strands, all grounded in the method of ethnography. This involves a commitment to knowing through deep and long-term immersion in other social worlds. My work aims to capture these everyday lived realities and uses these perspectives to think through broader conceptual and practical problems. Across a range of projects and publications, I have developed enduring interests in the social significance of the past, the nature and role of ‘expertise’, and the dialectics between conservation and development that are central to modern understandings of time as a form of ‘progress’.
Most of my recent research focuses on the social significance of the past. I am particularly interested in the ways that memory, history, nostalgia and memorialisation arise from twenty-first century concerns, including increasing economic precarity, political dis-affection and the growing sense of climate emergency. Through various projects, in the UK and Ghana, I have shown how orientations to the past reflect present senses of loss, uncertainty or threat and help people to imagine their lives in relation to these predicaments.
My most recent research focuses on steam enthusiasm, using this as a lens to explore bigger questions about the politics of nostalgia in twenty-first century Britain. Similar issues of memory and identity are also central to a major collaborative project, exploring the contemporary significance of Iron Age and Roman heritage in the UK (AHRC funded).
Alongside this, I have conducted research focusing on the construction of the historic environment as a material and symbolic object of interest. These issues were examined through ethnographic research based at the national heritage agency, Historic Environment Scotland (British Academy funded) and through a project on the effects of conservation science on understandings of historic value and significance of historic monuments (AHRC funded). They were also central to a project on the tensions between heritage conservation and energy conservation in the built environment (EPSRC and AHRC funded).
An earlier strand of my research examined ‘development’ as an idea that sustains multiple and conflicting practices. Research on the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana, (Leverhulme Trust funded) focused on the materialisation of ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ and how these ideas are embedded in the everyday lives of resettlers. Research on Ghanaian NGOs, looked at the social relations and practices through which they pursue various forms of social action (Development Beyond Politics, Palgrave Macmillan). The theoretical significance of this work lies in its challenge to the political reductionism of prevailing development scholarship, and the ‘Afro-pessimism’ of wider social theory pertaining to the post-colonial state in Africa.
Across my research on heritage and development, a key aim has been to better understand the practices and social relations through which expert knowledge is produced and the institutional contexts in which it circulates. Collectively these help to show how different kinds of expertise are linked to interventions that profoundly shape the material, historic and built environments we all inhabit.

Research Interests

Heritage and the politics of the past
Memory, nostalgia and time
Conservation
Architecture and the social construction of built environment
Energy and climate change
NGOs and Civil Society
Development knowledge and practice
Activism
Space and Place
Expert knowledge
Bureaucracy and Organisations
Intersections between Archaeology and Anthropology
Regional specialisms in the UK and West Africa