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). He was a 2024-2025 SCAS-Nordic Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala.
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.
He is currently work package leader and Management Board member in the Horizon Europe project ReMeD - Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (2023-2026). As Head of the ReMeD Methodology Coordination Group, he leads a pan-European qualitative study of how professional journalists, alternative & community media content producers, and citizens use and interact with digital platforms.
Vito is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, editor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications' thematic collection "Mediated Populism", a member of the editorial board of the journal Global Networks, 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 three science communication blogs: Corona Times; The Human Economy Blog; and Democracy in Action. He served as Communication Strategy Adviser for WWQA - World Water Quality Alliance, a United Nations Environment Programme partnership.
He has published widely in leading international journals such as The Journal of Development Studies; Energy Research & Social Science; The Extractive Industries and Society; Review of African Political Economy; Journal of Contemporary African Studies; Technology, Pedagogy and Education; and Anthropology Today, and academic presses such as Cambridge University Press; Routledge; Palgrave Macmillan; and Berghahn.
He held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Oslo, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, Bristol UWE, and University of Worcester (UK). He has held visiting fellowships at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Nordregio, and University of Mauritius.
His research has been funded by Horizon Europe, the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS), Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden), the Norwegian Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Jisc (UK), the National Institute of Health Research (UK), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (US), the National Research Foundation (South Africa), the Tertiary Education Commission (Mauritius), the SAHEE Foundation (Switzerland) and the Cambridge Newton Trust.
He writes regularly for national and international media, such as Al Jazeera English, Boston Review, Foreign Affairs, Africa Is A Country, and Daily Maverick. He has been a guest speaker on South African national radio for SAfm, Cape Talk, Radio 702, and Voice of the Cape.
SCHOLARLY FOCUS
Vito is an anthropologist, media scholar, and political analyst with an interdisciplinary orientation. 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 current work focuses digitalisation, new media, and communication, with interests in: political communication, digital propaganda, right-wing populism and digital democracy; social and organisational impact of digital technologies & AI; critical higher education studies; and green transition.
Vito has carried out field research in South Africa, Eswatini, UK, Norway and Italy. His early career was characterised by a specialism in southern and central Africa, which over the years has expanded into a focus on Europe, the Nordics, and North America.
His past work has focused extensively on political economy & ecology, specifically: global & regional development, industrialisation & green transitions; and global li-ion battery value and supply chains. He coordinated the Battery Justice Research Network (BATJUST), a global network of social scientists and sustainability scientists in five continents working on justice and transparency issues related to global li-ion battery value and supply chains.
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. This work brings together political economy, political ecology and phenomenological anthropology.
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.
He is currently work package leader and Management Board member in the Horizon Europe project ReMeD - Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (2023-2026). As Head of the ReMeD Methodology Coordination Group, he leads a pan-European qualitative study of how professional journalists, alternative & community media content producers, and citizens use and interact with digital platforms.
Vito is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, editor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications' thematic collection "Mediated Populism", a member of the editorial board of the journal Global Networks, 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 three science communication blogs: Corona Times; The Human Economy Blog; and Democracy in Action. He served as Communication Strategy Adviser for WWQA - World Water Quality Alliance, a United Nations Environment Programme partnership.
He has published widely in leading international journals such as The Journal of Development Studies; Energy Research & Social Science; The Extractive Industries and Society; Review of African Political Economy; Journal of Contemporary African Studies; Technology, Pedagogy and Education; and Anthropology Today, and academic presses such as Cambridge University Press; Routledge; Palgrave Macmillan; and Berghahn.
He held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Oslo, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, Bristol UWE, and University of Worcester (UK). He has held visiting fellowships at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Nordregio, and University of Mauritius.
His research has been funded by Horizon Europe, the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS), Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden), the Norwegian Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Jisc (UK), the National Institute of Health Research (UK), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (US), the National Research Foundation (South Africa), the Tertiary Education Commission (Mauritius), the SAHEE Foundation (Switzerland) and the Cambridge Newton Trust.
He writes regularly for national and international media, such as Al Jazeera English, Boston Review, Foreign Affairs, Africa Is A Country, and Daily Maverick. He has been a guest speaker on South African national radio for SAfm, Cape Talk, Radio 702, and Voice of the Cape.
SCHOLARLY FOCUS
Vito is an anthropologist, media scholar, and political analyst with an interdisciplinary orientation. 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 current work focuses digitalisation, new media, and communication, with interests in: political communication, digital propaganda, right-wing populism and digital democracy; social and organisational impact of digital technologies & AI; critical higher education studies; and green transition.
Vito has carried out field research in South Africa, Eswatini, UK, Norway and Italy. His early career was characterised by a specialism in southern and central Africa, which over the years has expanded into a focus on Europe, the Nordics, and North America.
His past work has focused extensively on political economy & ecology, specifically: global & regional development, industrialisation & green transitions; and global li-ion battery value and supply chains. He coordinated the Battery Justice Research Network (BATJUST), a global network of social scientists and sustainability scientists in five continents working on justice and transparency issues related to global li-ion battery value and supply chains.
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. This work brings together political economy, political ecology and phenomenological anthropology.
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Special Issues and Special Sections by Vito Laterza
voices, they were met with brutal police violence. Customary Nationalism in Crisis offers
snapshots of life in the Kingdom leading up to and in the aftermath of this epic moment,
providing lessons to the world on the power of the government to shape our lives through
the guise of custom and tradition and the power of ordinary people to resist this.
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 http://thehumaneconomy.blogspot.com/2014/05/special-issue-human-economy-project.html
Articles and Chapters by Vito Laterza
There is growing criticism of Big Tech platforms across different sectors of society. There is also increasing scepticism towards seemingly wholesale digitalisation of higher education (HE), largely enabled by platform firms, that followed COVID-19-related emergency online teaching. However, there is a scarcity of critical studies of the multiple, interconnected ways in which HE is affected by the rise of educational technology (EdTech) platforms and their providers. The goal of this chapter is to provide an extensive thematic review of the emerging body of work that takes a critical perspective, and particularly of work that highlights political economy dimensions of ongoing HE platformisation. We identify nine key, interrelated themes in the literature that may also signal structural shifts in HE related to rising platforms and providers. We note two meta-themes, platformisation and learnification, and seven sub-themes: datafication, assetisation, modularisation, crowdification, and peer-to-peering (under the meta-theme platformisation); and unbundling, and skillisation & short-circuiting (under the meta-theme learnification). Finally, we discuss the implications of our review, and propose a critical approach to EdTech provision, considering both negative aspects of ongoing platformisation and the need to preserve the public mission of HE in different contexts.
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.