Our People

Dr Branwen Spector

Fellow, Visiting Fellow

Departmental Lecturer

Oxford Department of International Development

BSc (Hons), PhD London School of Economics

Branwen is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on settler-colonialism, mobility, and infrastructures in Palestine. For her doctoral work she carried out 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in the West Bank where she explored how road, internet, and human infrastructures shape mobilities for both Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlers. She is now developing this material into a monograph, advancing theorising on mobility to include its social and virtual forms. Branwen is interested in how infrastructures function in settler-colonial contexts to produce unique temporalities and spaces of indigenous exclusion. She also works on social media, and is particularly interested in how they mediate mobility, allowing local users to navigate, map, and surveil.

Branwen is an enthusiastic scholar of methods and in 2016 co-founded The New Ethnographer, a project and teaching consultancy that writes and teaches on challenges in contemporary fieldwork. Their first textbook, Inclusive Ethnography: Making Fieldwork Safer, Healthier & More Ethical was published by Sage in 2024. They are now researching and developing teaching materials for a trauma-informed methodology for ethnographers. She is also developing, with colleagues, the first survey of trans ethnographers to develop trans-inclusive teaching materials for ethnographic methods training.