Emma Crewe is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the  Global Research Network for Parliaments and People at SOAS University of London. Her most recent book is An Anthropology of Parliaments: Entanglements in Democratic Politics (Routledge). She is on the right in the above photo, visiting the Sao Paulo Legislative Assembly with Professor Cristiane Bernardes.

Please tell us a little bit about how you entered academia and your academic career

I studied social anthropology at Edinburgh University. I fell in love with this discipline when I visited a village in Himachal Pradesh in 1984 as a 3^rd year undergraduate to study inter-caste relations. Caste was horrifying but it was exciting to realise that everything I knew about the world growing up in London was culturally specific. I had to unlearn to learn anew.

For years I worked in international development NGOs, continually arguing that we needed to unlearn our assumptions about progress and expertise and be more honest about the politics of aid. But due to disillusionment with my own capacity to change mindsets and practices, I returned to academia in the early 1990s getting a job as a university lecturer.

A few years later, I jumped to researching Parliaments – first the House of Lords and then the House of Commons. I wrote ethnographies of both Houses, aiming to be provocatively sympathetic in recognition of the increasingly difficult work that politicians and parliamentary officials do. I’m shifting towards a more critical view now, because scholars need to do a job of scrutiny as well, but I’m also creating coalitions for comparative work across parliaments (ww.grnpp.org). My two current jobs are a perfect combination for me: a research professor in social anthropology at SOAS University of London and supervisor of PhDs in management at the University of Hertfordshire. My obsession for today is how to make collaboration work well both intellectually and ethically.

Which five books/articles have been most important to you in your academic career?

As an undergraduate Nature, Culture and Gender edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern helped me realise that not only is gender experienced differently across cultures, but so are most interesting aspects of our being in the world. During my PhD the book that changed the way I think was Pierre Bourdieu’s An Outline of a Theory of Practice. I did not really understand it, but he gave me a way of conceiving of social structures beyond individuals and seeing how inequality was continually being created at every turn. His theory was so compelling, I got stuck in a post-structural rigidity for years. My examiner, Jonathan Spencer, was a massive influence – his article Post-colonialism and the Political Imagination (and later his book Anthropology, Politics and the State) – freed me up to think more about history, emotion and performance. Chantel Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses alerted me to the racism in much Western feminism but also scholarship more generally. It wasn’t until I worked with Ralph Stacey – who has written a range of books about complexity and management – that I began to understand the experience of structural constraint and individual freedom through the concept of paradox. Our colleague Chris Mowles summarises this theoretical approach beautifully in his book Managing in Uncertainty: Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life.

Which people have been most influential and important to you in your academic career?

Tony Good suggested that I apply for a PhD award under his supervision. I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing this in a million years if he hadn’t encouraged me. He was a brilliant supervisor. I liked to take arguments to the extreme and he kept pulling me back to a more honest position.

Which of your own pieces of research are you most proud of?

I like a passage where I copy Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall and provide the transcript of giving evidence to a select committee alongside an embarrassing narrative of the emotions I was feeling, and political tactics I remember calculating, as a witness during the session (the Anthropology of Parliaments, p.123).

What has been your greatest achievement in academia?

Learning to live with imposter syndrome.

What has been your greatest disappointment in academia?

Failing to entirely banish imposter syndrome.

What is the first or most important thing you tell your students about parliaments?

What you can’t easily see is even more interesting that what is on public view.

Where were you born, where did you grow up, and where do you live now?

Born in Cambridge, grew up in London, about to move to Hastings.

What was your first job?

A waitress in a hotel in Norfolk.

What was the toughest job you ever had?

Teaching undergraduate courses about branches of anthropology that I knew nothing about at all.

What  would your ideal job be, if not an academic?

A novelist if I had the talent, which I don’t.

What are your hobbies?

Chatting to my daughters in cafes and kitchens.

What are your favourite novels?

Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Moseley – it’s about love, political idealism, and history of the twentieth century. I read it as a student and it prepared me for life. Otherwise magical realism starting with Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits.

What is your favourite music?

Playlists created by my two daughters. I can enjoy the music, but also enjoy the thought of my daughters enjoying the music.

What is your favourite artwork?

Rodin sculptures in his museum in Paris for their beauty.

What is your favourite film?

Nearly all films directed by the Coen brothers for their humour.

What is your favourite building?

I find it interesting looking at religious buildings that are like Russian dolls – a temple inside a mosque inside a church etc – even though they can have disturbing histories.

What is your favourite tv show?

The Wire – the most sociological box set I’ve ever seen.

What is your favourite holiday destination?

Brancaster, North Norfolk, for the swimming, walks and mussels.

Hybrid proceedings in Parliament: yes please or no thanks?

No thanks.

Appointed or elected upper chamber?

Hybrid.

Restoration or Renewal?

Renewal.

Cat or Dog?

Cat in the house, dog outside.

Trains, planes or automobiles?

Trains.

Fish and chips or Curry?

Fish and chips in small towns, curry in the city.

Scones: Cornish or Devonshire method?

Cornish.

And, finally, a question asked by Ira and Bernadette, who have just turned four: What is your favourite letter of the alphabet and what’s your favourite number?

My favourites are Z and 5.