Alice Pearson

Alice’s research examines relations between capitalism, governance, and economics as a discipline. Her work 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. As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, her current research project reveals an unlikely history of how economics has reconfigured the legibility and legitimacy of claims on welfare since the 1970’s.

In previous research, Alice has examined relations between finance, expertise and the state. Her doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge interrogated relations between dual senses of economics as a ‘discipline’: as a form of knowledge and a mode of personhood. At UCL, she conducted ethnography of the Bank of England’s network of Agents to ask how they assemble understandings of ‘the economy’. As a Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, she unpacked how financial elites and economists have understood ‘financial crises’ since 1945. Throughout her work runs an interest in relations between anthropological, sociological, political and economic theory.