Breadcrumbs
Dr Luke Freeman
Personal details Back to top
- Title
- Dr
- Forname
- Luke
- Surname
- Freeman
- Gender
- Male
- Date record last updated
- Monday 31 January 2011
Contact information Back to top
- Preferred contact address:
- Department of Anthropology University College London 14 Taviton Street London WC1H 0BW
- Regions prepared to work:
- East of England; London; Midlands; North West; Scotland and Northern Ireland; South East; South West and Wales; Yorkshire and North East; International
- Telephone:
- +44 (0) 20 7679 5579
- E-mail:
- luke.freeman@ucl.ac.uk
- Website
- http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/
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Experience Back to top
- Job title:
- Lecturer in Anthropology
- Current institution:
- University College London
- CV
- Download file
- Relevant qualifications:
- PhD Anthropology - London School of Economics MSc Social Anthropology - University of Edinburgh BA French - University of Bristol
- Personal profile:
- Dr Luke Freeman is an academic anthropologist and trainer specialising in communication and education. He uses cross-cultural and educational insights to help people learn, work and communicate effectively. His approach is based on understanding oneself, other people, and the social context of each personal interaction. Luke has tutored for several years on the UK Grad programme and has been central to the planning and delivery of Vitae’s Careers in Academia and Advancing in Academia national events. He coaches a wide range of transferable skills, and has particular experience leading workshops on presentation and interview technique, and the ever-popular ‘How to finish your PhD’. An experienced contributor to written and broadcast media, Luke has won awards for writing and radio. He has made documentaries for BBC World Service and Radio 4, and featured on the flagship world affairs programme From our own Correspondent. As a social anthropologist and expert on Madagascar, Luke has lived in Madagascar for several years conducting research among isolated rice farmers, itinerant cattle drovers and top-ranking politicians. He has also lived and/or worked in Saudia Arabia, Israel, France, USA, Rwanda and Congo. He speaks French and Malagasy fluently, and German, Arabic and Hebrew to varying degrees of rustiness. This wide experience of other countries and cultures is central to Luke’s work as co-director of Anthroscape, a consultancy business which uses cross-cultural insights into personal and group interaction to inform human rights, development and education programmes. Luke is currently responsible for the educational ethos and content of Africa’s first social forestry management training centre. Presently a lecturer in anthropology at University College London, Luke has previously taught at the University of Antananarivo Madagascar, University of California at Santa Barbara and the London School of Economics. He has also worked as a tomb builder, hamburger chef, rice farmer, prison chaplain, goatherd, scarecrow and presidential speechwriter.
- Biography:
- Luke’s winding career path has led him to work in Madagascar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, USA, Rwanda, Congo and UK in jobs as diverse as teacher, nursery assistant, project evaluator, lecturer, researcher, radio broadcaster, scarecrow, policy developer, rice farmer, company director and presidential speech writer. The common factors in this apparently haphazard list are Luke’s main interests in life: language and communication; people and culture; and education and learning. These interests started when Luke’s parents took him out of primary school for a term to travel around Morocco, where he learned his first words of Arabic from a hitchhiking Tuareg camel herder. As a teenager Luke spent school holidays with a family of French wine-growing aristocrats. He so loved this cultural and linguistic immersion that he opted for a degree in Modern Languages, which included a year in a French-speaking country. He convinced his department to let him go to Madagascar, where he taught English in dusty ramshackle ill-equipped schools with classes of about 70 students, whose names were all 30 letters long and began with R. However, he soon found that Madagascar hadn’t been a French-speaking country for 30 years, so he didn’t learn much French. After a period of uncertain itinerancy which involved building a garden for the blind in Wales, growing junipers on a kibbutz and teaching English to Bedouins in an oil refinery near Riyadh, Luke decided to pursue a PhD in Anthropology, the study of human cultures. His research into knowledge and schooling took him back to Madagascar, to a remote village where he learned to speak Malagasy, grow rice, wrestle cattle, build tombs and sit through four-hour church services. Luke’s PhD and subsequent post-docs and lectureships established him as a professional academic, and he has taught at University of California at Santa Barbara, the London School of Economics and now University College London, specialising in the anthropology of education and communication. The expertise he has developed here has informed many of his non-academic activities, such as his radio documentaries for BBC World Service and Radio 4, his role as Director of Communications for the President of Madagascar, as well as his tutoring on GRADschools. In 2007 Luke co-founded Anthroscape, a consultancy business bringing insights from anthropology into education, training, human rights and development work. Recent projects include setting up Africa’s first social forestry management training centre and writing guidelines to protect the rights and resources of Pygmy hunter-gatherers in logging concessions in the Congo Basin.
- Testimonial one:
- Luke Freeman is a highly approachable, high-achieving research anthropologist with a gift for clear communication and strong teamwork strengths. I have worked with Luke on a number of Research Council Graduate Schools and observed the friendly authority he gains quickly with any student group. His strong sense of humour enhances the ease with which students can learn from him and optimise their understanding of working effectively in teams. Luke’s presentation skills are of a very high order and I have witnessed the level of attention he quickly gains and maintains with postgraduate student audiences. As a tutorial colleague, Luke is adaptive, supportive and aware of his goals, demonstrating a constant commitment to helping student participants and optimising his contribution to the tutor team. Luke, on every occasion when I have worked with him, has highlighted the widest range of researcher attributes by consistently utilising his own broad scope of skills. As a result, Luke is a highly effective role model for researchers, whether postgraduate students, or contract research staff. Dr Andrew Bottomley CChem MRSC BHR Associates Ltd and the University of Cambridge
- Audience:
- Postgraduate researchers
- Research staff
Specialist areas Back to top
- Type of work:
- Distance learning design / delivery
- e-learning design / delivery
- Mentoring
- Training delivery
- Training design and development
- Subject areas:
- Cultural awareness, equality and diversity
- Evaluation and feedback mechanisms
- Interpersonal skills development
- Knowledge transfer
- Leadership
- Outreach and public engagement
- Policy development and strategic management
- Preparation for academic practice, including teaching
- Project management
- Research methods
-
Experience of delivering
Vitae programmes: - GRADschool Tutor
Additional information Back to top
- Additional information: