Elisa Tamburo
Research Interests
Elisa is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. She is a social anthropologist with expertise in urban and environmental anthropology in China, Taiwan, and East Africa. Between 2020-2022 she was Postdoctoral Research Associate on an ERC-funded project (Cosmological Visionaries) at King's College London.
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. 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', where she 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.
Publications:
- Tamburo, E. (2023) Relocating the Future: biographical objects, aspiration, and repair in urban Taipei. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29(1): 24-47.
- Tamburo, E. (2020) High-rise social failures: regulating technologies, authority, and aesthetics in the resettlement of military villages in Taipei. Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2020(86): 36-52.
- Tamburo, E. (2018) Authoritarianism in the living room: everyday disciplines, senses and morality in Taiwan's military villages. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 47(2): 137-63.