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Luna Glucksberg

Goldsmiths University of London

Biography

I graduated from UCL in 2002 in anthropology and geography, after a dissertation project on the social significance of murals in Northern Ireland, based on ethnographic research in the Bogside in Derry. Themes of space/place, class, inequality and urban areas were already there at the beginning of my academic career, as was an affinity with ethnography, being and speaking with people on their own terms and trying to understand their reality/ies from their points of view. 

After graduating I worked for three years at the LSE for an international bibliographic service (IBSS) where I indexed and edited anthropological and sociological databases in various languages, which allowed me to grasp the extent and diversity of what social scientists do and how disciplinary boundaries vary across national and continental spheres. 

In 2006 I started a PhD at Goldsmiths, funded by the EPSRC: while the remit of the project was originally to look at the waste practices of people living in inner-city estates, it developed into an ethnographic study of gentrification and symbolic transmutations of waste and value, considering people and their waste practices as well as the wastage of their communities and built environment. 

I am currently working on suburbanization processes in Essex with Dr. Paul Watt, focusing on issues of senses of place, belonging and class, as well as developing my own publication plans and proposals for further research into the consequences of urban gentrification, especially around displacement and its social costs. 

Research

I have trained as an anthropologist, but have been supervised for most of my PhD by sociologist Bev Skeggs to work through issues of class and inequality. I am keen to work with academics who are interested in these themes regardless of disciplinary boundaries, and plan to develop my career in the broad context of urban studies.  My interests include: social inequality; social housing and/in the inner-city; social class and gentrification; displacement; activism and the tenants’ movement; mis-representations of the working classes; waste and recycling processes at both material and symbolic levels.