Event Details

The Department of Economics cordially invites you to the Esmée Fairbairn Lecture, presented by Eleanor Power, Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Eleanor's Lecture will focus on “Reputational poverty traps” and the reproduction of social inequality in South Asia and the world.

Eleanor Power is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she is now a member of the external faculty.

Eleanor is an anthropologist interested in the dynamics of social networks, especially relative to the factors that influence cooperation, competition, trust, and prestige. She studies these dynamics through fieldwork conducted in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. More generally, Eleanor is interested in investigating questions regarding the role of religion in society, gender differences in prominence and social capital, the dynamics of gossip and social censure, and the interplay of social and economic inequality.

Eleanor has two ongoing projects. One is a large collaborative, cross-cultural investigation into the social drivers of wealth inequality (ENDOW, funded by the US National Science Foundation); the other is a comparative and mixed-methods study into how people’s identities and social position influence how they are perceived by others, and so how they consequently choose to act in the world (Rep2SI, funded by the Leverhulme Trust).