Children’s Acquisition of Kinship Knowledge: Theory and Method (CAKTAM) Workshop

 Upcoming Workshop Children’s Acquisition of Kinship Knowledge: Theory and Method 25th-26th January 2018, Bristol, UK How do children learn kinship concepts? Given that both kin terms and kinship systems vary in complexity, to what extent does linguistic and cultural variation affect the acquisition of kinship knowledge? For many societies around the world, kinship provides the … Read more

Journal Club roundup

Post by Catherine We at the excd.lab are a highly interdisciplinary bunch, with backgrounds spanning anthropology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, music, biology, and statistics. Nowhere is this more evident than in our weekly journal club, where we come together (in an archaeology laboratory!) to discuss cultural evolution and learn more about each other’s areas of research. … Read more

excd.lab summer by the numbers

  Over summer, lab members have been super-busy on their various projects, taking advantage of the quiet(er) environment out of the teaching term. In the autumn, we have PhD upgrades, submissions, and vivas; papers to submit; some lab members to farewell (boo), and excitingly, a number of folk will be presenting at the Inaugural Cultural … Read more

February 2017 events in the excd.lab

As part of the British Academy International Partnership Mobility award that enabled Josh Birchall from the Museu Goeldi to visit us back in October, Fiona is currently in Belém, Brazil to meet with collaborators on an incipient comparative database of South American language and kinship. As part of her trip, Fiona gave a talk on “As dinâmicas da diversidade cultural e … Read more

Welcome to two new lab members

As the new year dawns, we welcome two new members to the excd.lab: Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow Sean Roberts joins us from a postdoc position in the Language and Cognition group at the MPI Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. His research is in evolutionary linguistics and statistical approaches to modelling cross-cultural data. He’ll be with us … Read more

Hosting visiting researchers

As part of the Varikin project, we are able to host visiting researchers who are funded by the National Science Foundation in the United States; the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning in South Korea; the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovationin Argentina; the Society for the Promotion of Science in Japan; the National … Read more

South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership

UK/EU students interested in applying for the AHRC South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SWW DTP), a funding scheme for PhD students in the arts and humanities, are invited to attend the SWW DTP Information Day on November 28 in Cardiff. Registration is free but must be completed by November 13: https://swwdtp.fluidreview.com/. Students interested in … Read more

October 2016 events in the excd.lab

1. We welcomed Sam Passmore and Simon Bishop as new PhD students in the lab. Sam will be working on the Varikin-Evolution project and Simon on cultural adjustment in overseas students at the University of Bristol. 2. We are excited to host Joshua Birchall from the Museu Goeldi in Belém, Brazil, for three weeks as part … Read more

September 2016 events in the excd.lab

1. We welcomed Dr Alice Mitchell and Dr Catherine Sheard to the VariKin project. Alice will be working on VariKin-Development, studying children’s understanding of kinship relations in Bristol and Tanzania, and Catherine will be working on Varikin-Evolution and providing admin support. 2. Fiona, Alice, and Peter are at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology … Read more