Alice Pearson

Dr Alice Pearson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Alice is an anthropologist and historian of economics, examining relations between capitalism, governance, and economics as a discipline. She holds a PhD and MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Government and Economics from LSE. Her research combines ethnographic and archival methods, and has included 24 months’ ethnography tracing how economic expertise circulates, crystallises and coalesces in governmental, financial and academic institutions, encoding moral and political projects. Throughout her work runs an interest in relations between anthropological, sociological and economic theory. As a Leverhulme Fellow, her current research project reveals an unlikely history of how economics has reformatted the legibility and legitimacy of claims on welfare since the 1970’s.