Vito Laterza
Vito is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway. In Agder, he leads the Sustainability, Digitalisation and Communication focus area at the Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT), and is a member of the university's Battery Coast initiative.
He is currently work package leader in the Horizon Europe project ReMeD - Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (2023-2026).
He is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, and a member of the international editorial board of HUMA - The Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town.
He was the founder and chief editor of the public engagement blog Corona Times, a HUMA project, and is currently the chief editor of the science communication blog Democracy in Action, a project of the University of Agder. He writes regularly for national and international media.
He received a BSc in Employment Relations & Human Resource Management from LSE, and an MPhil in Social Anthropological Research and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Vito is an anthropologist, development scholar and political analyst with an interdisciplinary orientation spanning three main areas: 1) political economy & ecology; 2) digitalisation, new media and communication; and 3) critical higher education studies. His work focuses on: higher education; digital technologies; political communication; local, regional and global sustainable development and green transitions; labour and organisations; socio-economic inequalities; and social and political mobilisation.
His approach is characterised by a systemic integration of ethnography, macro-level structural analysis, and epistemological & reflexive inquiry, in the tradition of “big ideas” social science and social theory.
His early career was characterised by a specialism in southern and central Africa, which over the years has grown into a sustained comparison between Africa and the West. Vito has carried out field research in South Africa, Eswatini, UK, Norway and Italy.
Vito has published widely in leading international journals such as The Journal of Development Studies; The Extractive Industries and Society; Review of African Political Economy;Technology, Pedagogy and Education; and Anthropology Today, and academic presses such as Cambridge University Press; Routledge; and Berghahn.
He held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Oslo, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, University of Mauritius, Bristol UWE, and University of Worcester (UK).
Vito's work has been funded by Horizon Europe, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Jisc (UK), the National Institute of Health Research (UK), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (US), the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, the National Research Foundation (South Africa), the Tertiary Education Commission (Mauritius), the SAHEE Foundation (Switzerland) and the Cambridge Newton Trust.
His doctoral research in Cambridge (2005-2011) was an ethnography of timber workers in the Kingdom of Eswatini. He studied in a former asbestos mining town, redeveloped as a social enterprise by white southern African and North American Pentecostal Christian missionaries. For-profit economic activities in the forestry industry were carried out in tandem with orphan care services. The study was extended to the adjacent rural community. Vito developed a grounded approach to foreign investment and donor aid that takes into account labour relations and company’s interactions with local communities, and brings together political economy, political ecology and phenomenological anthropology.
His current work comprises several streams:
1) Political communication and new forms of social and political mobilisation in Africa and the West, including spontaneous protests, right-wing populism, digital democracy, and environmental activism.
2) Justice, transparency and geopolitics in global lithium-ion battery value chains: socio-economic and socio-environmental inequalities at multiple scales.
3) The political economy of African development and underdevelopment from a North-South perspective, with a focus on: race, class and capital; land, labour and migration; and enclave development.
4) Socio-economic inequalities, economic development, digitalisation and organisational change in higher education in Africa and the Nordic countries.
5) The role of academic knowledge production and engaged scholarship in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vito worked with local governments, NGOs, trade unions, social movements, and community organisations in Norway, Europe and southern Africa on issues of digital communications, labour, socio-economic development, organisational change and green economy.
He is currently work package leader in the Horizon Europe project ReMeD - Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (2023-2026).
He is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, and a member of the international editorial board of HUMA - The Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town.
He was the founder and chief editor of the public engagement blog Corona Times, a HUMA project, and is currently the chief editor of the science communication blog Democracy in Action, a project of the University of Agder. He writes regularly for national and international media.
He received a BSc in Employment Relations & Human Resource Management from LSE, and an MPhil in Social Anthropological Research and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Vito is an anthropologist, development scholar and political analyst with an interdisciplinary orientation spanning three main areas: 1) political economy & ecology; 2) digitalisation, new media and communication; and 3) critical higher education studies. His work focuses on: higher education; digital technologies; political communication; local, regional and global sustainable development and green transitions; labour and organisations; socio-economic inequalities; and social and political mobilisation.
His approach is characterised by a systemic integration of ethnography, macro-level structural analysis, and epistemological & reflexive inquiry, in the tradition of “big ideas” social science and social theory.
His early career was characterised by a specialism in southern and central Africa, which over the years has grown into a sustained comparison between Africa and the West. Vito has carried out field research in South Africa, Eswatini, UK, Norway and Italy.
Vito has published widely in leading international journals such as The Journal of Development Studies; The Extractive Industries and Society; Review of African Political Economy;Technology, Pedagogy and Education; and Anthropology Today, and academic presses such as Cambridge University Press; Routledge; and Berghahn.
He held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Oslo, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, University of Mauritius, Bristol UWE, and University of Worcester (UK).
Vito's work has been funded by Horizon Europe, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Jisc (UK), the National Institute of Health Research (UK), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (US), the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, the National Research Foundation (South Africa), the Tertiary Education Commission (Mauritius), the SAHEE Foundation (Switzerland) and the Cambridge Newton Trust.
His doctoral research in Cambridge (2005-2011) was an ethnography of timber workers in the Kingdom of Eswatini. He studied in a former asbestos mining town, redeveloped as a social enterprise by white southern African and North American Pentecostal Christian missionaries. For-profit economic activities in the forestry industry were carried out in tandem with orphan care services. The study was extended to the adjacent rural community. Vito developed a grounded approach to foreign investment and donor aid that takes into account labour relations and company’s interactions with local communities, and brings together political economy, political ecology and phenomenological anthropology.
His current work comprises several streams:
1) Political communication and new forms of social and political mobilisation in Africa and the West, including spontaneous protests, right-wing populism, digital democracy, and environmental activism.
2) Justice, transparency and geopolitics in global lithium-ion battery value chains: socio-economic and socio-environmental inequalities at multiple scales.
3) The political economy of African development and underdevelopment from a North-South perspective, with a focus on: race, class and capital; land, labour and migration; and enclave development.
4) Socio-economic inequalities, economic development, digitalisation and organisational change in higher education in Africa and the Nordic countries.
5) The role of academic knowledge production and engaged scholarship in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vito worked with local governments, NGOs, trade unions, social movements, and community organisations in Norway, Europe and southern Africa on issues of digital communications, labour, socio-economic development, organisational change and green economy.
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Special Issues and Special Sections by Vito Laterza
Published by the Review of African Political Economy.
Available at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/crea20/44/152
Editorial introduction is open access, you can download it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2017.1345540
Anthropology Southern Africa, Vol. 36, Issue 3&4, December 2013
You can read and download the articles in this collection at https://thehumaneconomy.blogspot.com/2014/05/special-issue-human-economy-project.html
Articles and Chapters by Vito Laterza
This article is guided by the following overarching question: Is there a Scandinavian model for massive open online courses (MOOCs)? We study MOOCs in the Scandinavian context and investigate digital transformation in higher education (HE). Based on a review of the current academic literature on MOOCs in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden and a document analysis of government reports and white papers, we identified similarities and differences between MOOCs at higher education institutions (HEIs) in these countries. We found that the delivery of MOOCs is linked to new forms of negotiations and tensions between academic, administrative, and ICT staff and, to some extent, government involvement. We also found that the governments’ roles differ in terms of the development of MOOC offerings and their overall engagement with digitalisation at HEIs. Moreover, MOOCs have developed at their own pace and have brought renewed attention to teaching and learning with technology, with some spill-over effects on campus-based programmes at HEIs.
The current version published on Cultural Anthropology's Member Voices site, is a transcription of the conversation we held for Keith, which took place at the 2018 European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) meeting in Stockholm. We asked people to think about the great themes of Keith’s work, including both methods and topics: money and currency; and scale and how to bridge individual experience, global process, and world history.
The article provides an overview of the history of race, class and capital in the interlinked mining economies of South Africa, the Zambian Copperbelt, and Haut-Katanga, DRC. This is followed by a synthesis of the special issue articles and themes, with a conceptual framework to understand mining and post-mining economies in southern and central Africa today.
This introductory paper analyses historical and contemporary developments in the social and political mobilisation of what are termed ‘extractive communities’ in Africa. It demonstrates the centrality of diverse contestations, both between extractive corporations and extractive communities, and within communities themselves, over the real and envisioned benefits of mining and oil production. In contextualising the articles carried in this special section of "Extractive Industries and Society", it places these dynamics in an assessment of Africa’s past and current position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation, and, building on the insights of these articles, suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed in the future.
In the growing literature on public involvement in research (PIR), very few works analyse PIR organizational and institutional dimensions in depth. We explore the complex interactions of PIR with institutions and bureaucratic procedures, with a focus on the process of securing institutional permissions for members of the public (we refer to them as “research partners”) and academics involved in health research.
Methods
We employ a collaborative autoethnographic approach to describe the process of validating “research passports” required by UK NHS trusts, and the individual experiences of the authors who went through this journey – research partners and academics involved in a qualitative study of PIR across eight health sciences projects in England and Wales.
Results
Our findings show that research partners encountered many challenges, as the overall bureaucratic procedures and the emotional work required to deal with them proved burdensome. The effects were felt by the academics too who had to manage the whole process at an early stage of team building in the project. Our thematic discussion focuses on two additional themes: the emerging tensions around professionalisation of research partners, and the reflexive effects on PIR processes.
Conclusions
In the concluding section, we make a number of practical recommendations. Project teams should allow enough time to go through all the hurdles and steps required for institutional permissions, and should plan in advance for the right amount of time and capacity needed from project leaders and administrators. Our findings are a reminder that the bureaucratic and organisational structures involved in PIR can sometimes produce unanticipated and unwanted negative effects on research partners, hence affecting the overall quality and effectiveness of PIR. Our final recommendation to policy makers is to focus their efforts on making PIR bureaucracy more inclusive and ultimately more democratic.
Article in Italian developing some of the insights of the human economy approach to the Italian crisis, with a strong focus on informality and society to counter more common top-down state-market analyses.
Published by the Review of African Political Economy.
Available at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/crea20/44/152
Editorial introduction is open access, you can download it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2017.1345540
Anthropology Southern Africa, Vol. 36, Issue 3&4, December 2013
You can read and download the articles in this collection at https://thehumaneconomy.blogspot.com/2014/05/special-issue-human-economy-project.html
This article is guided by the following overarching question: Is there a Scandinavian model for massive open online courses (MOOCs)? We study MOOCs in the Scandinavian context and investigate digital transformation in higher education (HE). Based on a review of the current academic literature on MOOCs in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden and a document analysis of government reports and white papers, we identified similarities and differences between MOOCs at higher education institutions (HEIs) in these countries. We found that the delivery of MOOCs is linked to new forms of negotiations and tensions between academic, administrative, and ICT staff and, to some extent, government involvement. We also found that the governments’ roles differ in terms of the development of MOOC offerings and their overall engagement with digitalisation at HEIs. Moreover, MOOCs have developed at their own pace and have brought renewed attention to teaching and learning with technology, with some spill-over effects on campus-based programmes at HEIs.
The current version published on Cultural Anthropology's Member Voices site, is a transcription of the conversation we held for Keith, which took place at the 2018 European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) meeting in Stockholm. We asked people to think about the great themes of Keith’s work, including both methods and topics: money and currency; and scale and how to bridge individual experience, global process, and world history.
The article provides an overview of the history of race, class and capital in the interlinked mining economies of South Africa, the Zambian Copperbelt, and Haut-Katanga, DRC. This is followed by a synthesis of the special issue articles and themes, with a conceptual framework to understand mining and post-mining economies in southern and central Africa today.
This introductory paper analyses historical and contemporary developments in the social and political mobilisation of what are termed ‘extractive communities’ in Africa. It demonstrates the centrality of diverse contestations, both between extractive corporations and extractive communities, and within communities themselves, over the real and envisioned benefits of mining and oil production. In contextualising the articles carried in this special section of "Extractive Industries and Society", it places these dynamics in an assessment of Africa’s past and current position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation, and, building on the insights of these articles, suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed in the future.
In the growing literature on public involvement in research (PIR), very few works analyse PIR organizational and institutional dimensions in depth. We explore the complex interactions of PIR with institutions and bureaucratic procedures, with a focus on the process of securing institutional permissions for members of the public (we refer to them as “research partners”) and academics involved in health research.
Methods
We employ a collaborative autoethnographic approach to describe the process of validating “research passports” required by UK NHS trusts, and the individual experiences of the authors who went through this journey – research partners and academics involved in a qualitative study of PIR across eight health sciences projects in England and Wales.
Results
Our findings show that research partners encountered many challenges, as the overall bureaucratic procedures and the emotional work required to deal with them proved burdensome. The effects were felt by the academics too who had to manage the whole process at an early stage of team building in the project. Our thematic discussion focuses on two additional themes: the emerging tensions around professionalisation of research partners, and the reflexive effects on PIR processes.
Conclusions
In the concluding section, we make a number of practical recommendations. Project teams should allow enough time to go through all the hurdles and steps required for institutional permissions, and should plan in advance for the right amount of time and capacity needed from project leaders and administrators. Our findings are a reminder that the bureaucratic and organisational structures involved in PIR can sometimes produce unanticipated and unwanted negative effects on research partners, hence affecting the overall quality and effectiveness of PIR. Our final recommendation to policy makers is to focus their efforts on making PIR bureaucracy more inclusive and ultimately more democratic.
Article in Italian developing some of the insights of the human economy approach to the Italian crisis, with a strong focus on informality and society to counter more common top-down state-market analyses.
This study was concerned with developing the evidence base for public involvement in research in health and social care. There now is significant support for public involvement within the National Institute for Health Research, and researchers applying for National Institute for Health Research grants are expected to involve the public. Despite this policy commitment, evidence for the benefits of public involvement in research remains limited. This study addressed this need through a realist evaluation.
AIM AND OBJECTIVES:
The aim was to identify the contextual factors and mechanisms that are regularly associated with effective public involvement in research. The objectives included identifying a sample of eight research projects and their desired outcomes of public involvement, tracking the impact of public involvement in these case studies, and comparing the associated contextual factors and mechanisms.
DESIGN:
The research design was based on the application of realist theory of evaluation, which argues that social programmes are driven by an underlying vision of change – a ‘programme theory’ of how the intervention is supposed to work. The role of the evaluator is to compare theory and practice. Impact can be understood by identifying regularities of context, mechanism and outcome. Thus the key question for the evaluator is ‘What works for whom in what circumstances . . . and why?’ (Pawson R. The Science of Evaluation. London: Sage; 2013). We therefore planned a realist evaluation based on qualitative case studies of public involvement in research.
Setting and participants:
Eight diverse case studies of research projects in health and social care took place over the calendar year 2012 with 88 interviews from 42 participants across the eight studies: researchers, research managers, third-sector partners and research partners (members of the public involved in research).
RESULTS:
Case study data supported the importance of some aspects of our theory of public involvement in research and led us to amend other elements. Public involvement was associated with improvements in research design and delivery, particularly recruitment strategies and materials, and data collection tools. This study identified the previously unrecognised importance of principal investigator leadership as a key contextual factor leading to the impact of public involvement; alternatively, public involvement might still be effective without principal investigator leadership where there is a wider culture of involvement. In terms of the mechanisms of involvement, allocating staff time to facilitate involvement appeared more important than formal budgeting. Another important new finding was that many research proposals significantly undercosted public involvement. Nurturing good interpersonal relationships was crucial to effective involvement. Payment for research partner time and formal training appeared more significant for some types of public involvement than others. Feedback to research partners on the value of their contribution was important in maintaining motivation and confidence.
CONCLUSIONS:
A revised theory of public involvement in research was developed and tested, which identifies key regularities of context, mechanism and outcome in how public involvement in research works. Implications for future research include the need to further explore how leadership on public involvement might be facilitated, methodological work on assessing impact and the development of economic analysis of involvement.
FUNDING DETAILS:
The National Institute for Health Research Health Service and Delivery programme.
Commentary on January 2015 Zambian presidential by-election and the implications for Zambian politics.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143214/vito-laterza-and-patience-mususa/zambias-uncertain-future
https://thehumaneconomy.blogspot.com/2014/08/hep-workshop-land-money-and-human.html
ASA14 Decennial: Anthropology and Enlightenment