Profile
Dr Anais Carlton-Parada specialises in anthropology and design, with a focus on relationality across posthuman and decolonial perspectives. She is particularly interested in witchcraft, both from the perspective of a scholar and a practitioner.
Anais has previously taught at the University of South Carolina in the Department of Anthropology, where she focused on cultural anthropology and material culture. She has been invited to deliver talks and lectures in various national and international contexts, often on witchcraft and more-than-human relationality or around organizing away from dominant colonial and capitalist practices. She continues to work within entanglements between othered spiritual and experiential practices and resistance to hegemonic institutions and oppressions.
She was Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Counter-Framing Design, led by Principal Investigator Dr Sharon Prendeville. The project involved ethnographic research and participatory design to examine and engage in organising toward alternative ecological and economic practices. She is also currently a research associate on UnEdge: Design for Relational Economies, a project that emerged from Counter-Framing Design with more of a focus on practical applications of research on grassroots organising.
She completed a PhD at the University of South Carolina, studying at the significance of dress as a semiotic process that supported autonomy for the Puruhá community in Ecuador. She has since moved towards critique of positionality in the field and questions of how to apply anthropological theory and methods to co-conspiratorial work for emerging social justice movements.