Staff profile

I read English Literature at Durham, later moving to social anthropology at Cambridge University. Inbetween I worked for a number of central government departments in Britain and Turkey. I moved to the Durham Anthropology Department in 2012 after ten years in Goldsmiths.

I’ve carried out fieldwork in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Britain and Tanzania. Most of that has been on changing relations between state, market and the third sector, the built environment, local and central bureaucracy, migration, and various forms of waste and recycling (repair, reuse, recovery etc). I've also explored how formerly elite closed ‘nuclear’ towns in Kazakhstan are trying to re-connect to broader economies.

I have just completed a Leverhulme Trust funded Major Research fellowship (2019-2022) thinking about how different forms and fears of failure affect complex organisations, such as large science collaborations, and how they are experienced by the people who work within them. The first publication from this is After Failure, a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

• Urban anthropology
• Social/public housing
• post-socialism
• Middle East (Turkey)
• Central Asia (Kazakhstan)
• Britain
• Economic and political anthropology
• Changing property regimes
• Privatisation
• Third / voluntary sector
• wastes (including recycling)
• Bureaucracy
• Indeterminacy
• Failure
• Inequalities
• Migration

Authored book

• Alexander, C. (2002). Personal States: making connections between people and bureaucracy in Turkey. (New ed.). Oxford University Press

Chapter in book

• Alexander, C., & Sosna, D. (2022). Thrift, Anti-thrift, Scale and Paradox. In C. Alexander, & D. Sosna (Eds.), Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy. Berghahn Books
• Gille, Z., Lepawsky, J., Alexander, C., & Gregson, N. (2022). At home with the waste scholar. In Z. Gille, & J. Lepawsky (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003019077
• Alexander, C., & Reno, J. (2020). Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice. In M. Aldenderfer (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopaedia of anthropology. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.18
• Duckworth, C., Wilson, A., Van Oyen, A., Alexander, C., Evans, J., Green, C., & Mattingley, D. (2020). When the Statue is both Marble and Lime. In C. Duckworth, & A. Wilson (Eds.), Recycling and reuse in the Roman economy (449-460). Oxford University Press
• Alexander, C., & Sanchez, A. (2019). Introduction: The Values of Indeterminacy. In C. Alexander, & A. Sanchez (Eds.), Indeterminacy : waste, value, and the imagination (1-30). Berghahn Books
• Alexander, C. (2019). Indeterminate classifications: being ‘more than kin’ in Kazakhstan. In C. Alexander, & A. Sanchez (Eds.), Indeterminacy : waste, value, and the imagination (134-160). Berghahn Books
• Alexander, C. (2018). Charity and philanthropy. In H. Callan (Ed.), International encyclopaedia of anthropology : anthropology beyond text. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1689
• Alexander, C. (2015). Central Asia, Anthropology of. In J. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences. Second edition (316-322). (2nd ed.). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.12177-4
• Alexander, C., Gregson, N., & Gille, Z. (2013). Food waste. In A. Murcott, W. Belasco, & P. Jackson (Eds.), The Handbook of Food Research (471-485). Bloomsbury
• Alexander, C. (2013). Soviet and Post-Soviet Planning in Almaty, Kazakhstan. In A. Massey (Ed.), Public Sector Reform (165-181). SAGE Publications
• Alexander, C. (2013). The Garden as Occasional Domestic Space. In C. Briganti, & K. Mezei (Eds.), The Domestic Space Reader. University of Toronto Press
• Alexander, C., & Reno, J. (2012). Introduction. In C. Alexander, & J. Reno (Eds.), Economies of recycling: the global transformation of materials, values and social relations (1-34). (New ed.). Zed Books
• Alexander, C. (2012). Remont: works in progress. In C. Alexander, & J. Reno (Eds.), Economies of recycling: the global transformation of materials, values and social relations (255-275). (New ed.). Zed Books
• Alexander, C. (2012). Economic valuations and environmental policy (Updated). In J. Carrier (Ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology (451-468). (2nd Ed.). Edward Elgar Publishing
• Alexander, C. (2010). The Third Sector. In K. Hart, J. Laville, & A. Cattani (Eds.), The Human Economy: a citizen's guide (213-224). (New ed.). Polity Press
• Alexander, C. (2009). Illusions of freedom: Polanyi and the third sector. In C. Hann, & K. Hart (Eds.), Market and society : the great transformation today (221-239). Cambridge University Press
• Alexander, C. (2009). Privatization: jokes, scandal and absurdity in a time of rapid change. In K. Sykes (Ed.), Ethnographies of moral reasoning: living paradoxes of a global age (43-65). Palgrave Macmillan
• Alexander, C. (2008). Waste under socialism and after: a case-study from Almaty. In H. West, & P. Raman (Eds.), Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation (148-168). Berghahn Books
• Alexander, C., & Buchli, V. (2007). Introduction. In C. Alexander, V. Buchli, & C. Humphrey (Eds.), Urban Life in post-Soviet Asia (1-39). (New ed.). UCL Press (Routledge)
• Alexander, C. (2007). Almaty: rethinking the public sector. In C. Alexander, V. Buchli, & C. Humphrey (Eds.), Urban life in post-Soviet Asia (70-101). (New ed.). UCL Press (Routledge)
• Alexander, C. (2005). Value: Economic Valuations and Environmental Policy. In J. Carrier (Ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781845423469.00044
• Alexander, C. (2004). Values, Relations and Changing Bodies: Industrial Privatisation in Kazakhstan. In C. Humphrey, & K. Verdery (Eds.), Property in Question: appropriation, recognition and value transformation in the global economy. Berghahn Books

Edited book

• Alexander, C. (Ed.). (2023). After Failure. Wiley
• Alexander, C., & O'Hare, P. (Eds.). (2023). Technologies of Unknowing Waste: Displacement, Depoliticisation and Disappearance. Taylor and Francis
• Alexander, C., & Sosna, D. (Eds.). (2022). Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy. Berghahn Books
• Alexander, C., & Sanchez, A. (Eds.). (2018). Indeterminacy: waste, value and the imagination. Berghahn Books
• Alexander, C., Hojer Bruun, M., & Koch, I. (Eds.). (2018). Moral Economies of Housing. SAGE Publications
• Alexander, C., & Reno, J. (Eds.). (2012). Economies of Recycling: The global transformation of materials, values and social relations. Zed Books
• Alexander, C., Buchli, V., & Humphrey, C. (Eds.). (2007). Urban life in post-Soviet Asia. UCL Press (Routledge)

Journal Article

• Alexander, C. (2023). Suspending failure: temporalities, ontologies and gigantism in fusion energy development. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29(S1), 114-132. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13905
• Alexander, C. (2023). A Chronotope of Expansion: resisting spatio-temporal limits in a Kazakh nuclear town. Ethnos, 88(3), 467-490. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796735
• Alexander, C., & O’Hare, P. (2023). Waste and its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)knowing. Ethnos, 88(3), 419-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734
• Alexander, C. (2023). Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 29, 8-30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13899
• Alexander, C. (2022). The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64(4), 934-965. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417522000159
• Alexander, C. (2020). Cleaning up and moving on: Kazakhstan's 'nuclear renaissance'. Habaršy Хабаршы (Ķazaķ memlekettìk ķyzdar pedagogikalyķ universitet) (Қазақ мемлекеттік қыздар педагогикалық университеті), 4, 113-125
• Alexander, C., Wardle, H., Chevalier, S., Gbadamosi, G., Hann, C., Hannerz, U., …Rakopoulous, T. (2019). A Conversation around Keith Hart: Swimming into the Current of Human Society through History. Cultural Anthropology,
• Alexander, C., Hojer Bruun, M., & Koch, I. (2018). Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing. Critique of Anthropology, 38(2), 121-139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x18758871
• Alexander, C. (2018). Homeless in the Homeland: housing protests in Kazakhstan. Critique of Anthropology, 38(2), 204-220. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x18758872
• Alexander, C. (2017). The meeting as subjunctive form: public/private IT projects in British and Turkish state bureaucracies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1), 80-94. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12595
• Alexander, C. (2016). When Waste Disappears, or More Waste Please!. RCC perspectives (Internet), 1, 31-39. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7391
• Alexander, C., & Reno, J. (2014). From Biopower to Energopolitics in England’s Modern Waste Technology. Anthropological quarterly, 87(2), 335-358. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0023
• Alexander, C. (2010). Wasting the planet. Anthropology Now, 2(3), 81-88
• Alexander, C., Curran, A., Smaje, C., & Williams, I. (2009). Evaluation of bulky waste and re-use schemes in England. Waste and Resource Management, 162(3), 141-150. https://doi.org/10.1680/warm.2009.162.3.141
• Alexander, C., Smaje, C., Timlett, R., & Williams, I. (2009). Improving Social technologies for recycling: interfaces, estates, multi-family dwellings and infrastructural deprivation. Waste and Resource Management, 162(1), 15-28. https://doi.org/10.1680/warm.2009.162.1.15
• Alexander, C., Druckman, A., Osinski, C., & Jackson, T. (2009). Use of home food digesters to reduce household waste. Waste and Resource Management, 162(3), 129-139. https://doi.org/10.1680/warm.2009.162.3.129
• Alexander, C. (2008). Waste minimisation and surplus retail food redistribution: an analysis of the FareShare brokering model. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 52, 1290-1298
• Alexander, C., & Smaje, C. (2008). Evaluating third sector re-use organisations in the UK: case studies and analysis of furniture re-use schemes. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 53(5), 719-730. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2007.09.005
• Alexander, C. (2007). Soviet and post-Soviet city planning: a case study from Almaty. Critique of Anthropology, 27(2), 165-182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x07076787
• Alexander, C. (2006). Rethinking the household and domestic material flows
• Alexander, C., & Tatibekov, B. (2006). Characteristics of migration in Kazakhstan
• Alexander, C. (2004). The cultures and properties of decaying buildings. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 44, 48-60. https://doi.org/10.3167/092012904782311263
• Alexander, C. (2004). Review essay of Michael Brown's Who Own's Cultural Property?
• Alexander, C. (2003). Taking Control of Aisha Bibi: nationalist projects and local heritage in Kazakhstan
• Alexander, C. (2003). Images of the State in Contemporary Turkey. Turkish area studies, 2, 38-40
• Alexander, C. (2002). The garden as occasional domestic space. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(3), 467-485. https://doi.org/10.1086/337930
• Alexander, C. (2001). Legal and binding: time, change and long-term transactions. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7(3), 467-485
• Alexander, C. (2000). The Factory: Fabricating the State. Journal of Material Culture, 5(2), 177-195. https://doi.org/10.1177/135918350000500203

Report

• Gregson, N., & Alexander, C. (2017). What is Waste?. [No known commissioning body]