I am Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto; and Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. My ethnographic work in South America and Western Europe has focused on the connection between the ways in which people make a livelihood and their forms of political expression. I am also interested in modes of political engagement and the work of intellectuals, discussed in Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism(2014).
My contribution to University Worlds is to track experiments in novel forms of higher education in parts of Europe where university-based intellectual work is deeply constrained but new modes of scholarship and political engagement are emerging.