Richard Fraser
Job description
Richard Fraser is an anthropologist and Professor within the Anthropology section of the Department of Social Sciences. His research concerns human-environment and multispecies relations, infrastructure and China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), multimodal anthropology and critical heritage studies, and China's role in the Arctic.
He is PI of the ERC-funded "ZOONOSIS: Zoonotic Anthropology and Multispecies Infrastructures Along China's Belt and Road" (ERC Starting Grant 2026-2031 - 1.5 million euros):
and the Nordforsk-funded "SPECIES: Sustainable Multispecies Relations in the Arctic" (NORDFORSK 2025-2028 – NOK 24 million).
ACADEMIC INTERESTS:
Human-Environment Relations (Zoonoses, Multispecies and More-than-human, Resource Extraction)
Multimodal Anthropology and Critical Heritage Studies (Museums, Photo-Elicitation, Repatriation, and Digital Return)
Phenomenological, Existential, and Psychological Anthropology
Infrastructure (Roads, Pipelines, China's Belt and Road Initiative)
Indigenous People, Ethnic Minorities, and the State
Pastoralism, Hunting and Conservation (Displacement and Resettlement, Protected Areas)
Religion (Cosmology, Shamanism, Animism, the Ontological Turn)
Enskilment and Deskilment
REGIONAL:
China (Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Guizhou, Sichuan)
Mongolia
Siberia and the Arctic
ABOUT:
Richard completed his PhD at the University of Leiden and undertook two postdoctoral projects at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge. He has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Heilongjiang province since 2007, and in Mongolia since 2010.
More recently, he has started new ethnographic fieldwork in China's Southwest - in Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan provinces.
His research has been funded by: Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), JPI-EU Cultural Heritage Network, Nordforsk, and the European Research Council (ERC).
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Research interests
Richard is involved in several interrelated projects.
First, he is leading the ERC Starting Grant: "ZOONOSIS: Zoonotic Anthropology and Multispecies Infrastructures along China's Belt and Road" (European Research Council 2026-2031 - 1.5 million euros).
It develops a new field of zoonotic anthropology by examining how large-scale infrastructure projects reshape relationships between humans, animals, and microbes along China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As roads, railways, ports, and trade corridors transform landscapes across Asia and Africa, they create new contact zones where people, wildlife, livestock, and pathogens increasingly interact. These changing multispecies relationships have significant implications for the emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases - infectious diseases that pass between animals and humans.
By bringing together anthropology, ecology, and epidemiology, the project investigates how infrastructure not only facilitates the movement of goods and people but also reshapes the circulation of animals, microbes, and knowledge across borders.
The research addresses two major knowledge gaps. First, it examines how infrastructure generates new multispecies contact zones in which wildlife, livestock, pathogens, and humans become entangled, creating conditions that may increase zoonotic risk. Second, it explores how China's expanding health diplomacy—including vaccine programmes, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) hospitals, and public health initiatives associated with the Belt and Road—transforms biosecurity practices and pandemic preparedness in partner countries.
The project focuses on three interconnected contact zones across multiple ethnographic field sites:
Wildlife trade for Traditional Chinese Medicine in southwest China.
The industrialisation of meat production and exports in Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
Wet markets and informal food economies in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, ecological and epidemiological data, and innovative multimodal research methods, the project investigates how zoonotic risks emerge through everyday interactions between humans and other species. Working in complex and often sensitive contexts—including illegal wildlife trade—the research combines anthropological insight with environmental and public health perspectives to develop new approaches to understanding disease emergence.
Second, Richard is leading the NORDFORSK-funded, "SPECIES: Sustainable Multispecies Relations in the Arctic" (NORDFORSK 2025-2028 – NOK 24 million), with partners in Norway, Denmark, and Finland. The project explores six conflicts surrounding iconic Arctic species in three representative countries: 1) Reindeer and King crabs in Norway; 2) Lapland cattle and Baltic seals in Finland; and 3) Polar bears and Muskoxen in Greenland. In each case, we adopt a multispecies and multi-disciplinary lens, bringing together several researchers from diverse fields (anthropology, biology, ecology, technology studies, genetics, audio-visual art) and putting them in dialogue with local and/or indigenous stakeholders and nonhuman animals connected to each site.
Together, they are co-researching the conflicts and highlighting the similarities and differences between their perspectives, connecting this to different environmental and multispecies ontologies. This will create a framework for the co-creation of knowledge through interdisciplinary co-research, to facilitate the mutual understanding of each conflict, share knowledge across perspectival boundaries, and identify common points of agreement to impact sustainability.
Building upon indigenous and decolonial methodologies, the project is hosting a series of participatory workshops to identify common goals. These will be led by our local and indigenous partners highlighting the relevance of their knowledge and practices for sustainable resource management, while the researchers will show the potential of their findings for local solutions. The project will also facilitate mobility of researchers and local/indigenous partners between sites to facilitate communication and knowledge exchange adding Arctic, Nordic, and Indigenous Value. In the process, it will build alliances between science, art, and local/indigenous stakeholders to better promote sustainability and encourage more culturally sensitive multispecies relations in the Arctic.
Third, Richard is writing up the recently completed JPI-funded, “ArcHeritage: Commodification, Identity, and Revitalisation in the Anthropocene” (JPI Cultural Heritage, Society and Ethics 2023-2026 – NOK 3.1 million), with partners at the University of Aberdeen (David Anderson) and University of Groningen (Maarten Loonen). The project explored the commodity chains of three iconic heritage artefacts in the Arctic: reindeer antler, the conical tent, and walrus ivory. We traced the oral histories and new market and social entanglements of these artefacts across several sites in Sápmi, Canada, and Greenland, linking them to historical pastoralist and hunting lifeways and their transformation over time. In recent years, each artefact has taken a new form within the heritage and tourism industries: reindeer antler as Traditional Chinese Medicine, the conical tent as a fixed tourism dwelling, and walrus ivory as souvenir carvings. They thus tell a wider story of Arctic heritage and the relationship between indigenous producers, consumers, and the market.
For this, Richard was also leading a Network Project "Heritage making in the Arctic", as part of the Thematic Network on Circumpolar Archives, Folklore and Ethnography (CAFE), funded by UArctic: https://www.uarctic.org/activities/thematic-networks/circumpolar-archives-folklore-and-ethnography-cafe/
Fourth, Richard is a researcher in the project, "Arctic Silk Road: Imagining Global Infrastructures and Community Boundaries in Sápmi and the Russian North" (Norwegian Research Council 2021-2026), led by Dr. Natalia Magnani. This is a project which follows the imagination of global infrastructures across time and space. We focus on experiences of planning and anticipating constructions along the Arctic Silk Road from China across the Circumpolar North—in Sápmi, along the northern Russian coast, and other connected sites. Furthermore, we examine comparative cases of large-scale infrastructural networks historical and emerging.
For this, he is a Visiting Research Associate at the Arctic Studies Centre at Liaocheng University in China (http://en.asclcu.cn/).
Finally, Richard is completing a book project: “On the Edge of the Taiga: Skill, Social Change and More-Than-Human Relations in Postsocialist Northern Mongolia”, based on his PhD fieldwork and currently under contract with Routledge.
Teaching
Richard teaches courses in both the Bachelor of Anthropology and the Master of Visual and Multimodal Anthropology programs, as well as the Master of Indigenous Studies.
Courses include: Multispecies and Environmental Anthropology, Multimodal Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Anthropological Theory, Phenomenology and Existentialism, Cultural Heritage and Digital Repatriation, and the regional ethnography of China, Siberia, and the Arctic.
