Thomas Carter

I am open to various subjects, approaches, and methods.  I am especially interested in projects emerging out of and develop the Anthropology of Sport and that use ethnography as a principle research methodology. Specific areas of interest include the Sport for Development and Peace sector. Projects could have fieldwork anywhere in the world but I am particularly interested in projects in Latin America and the Global South. Other topics of interest and expertise include global labor and transnational migration in sport, the politics of spectacle and performance, and the sensory ecologies of embodiment, being, and becoming through physical activity.

I approach teaching as a collaborative effort between my students and me. Students already have a wealth of knowledge and experience, but do not necessarily have the skills to apply or query that knowledge and experience. Thus, students learn through an active engagement, often in a conversational style, between my students and myself and amongst students in seminars and on the web. I do this by getting them to engage with their world, their interests, and their core beliefs and encouraging them to consistently ask what is actually going on around them. I encourage students pursue their own interests, making their education more vibrant and taking me on a journey with them where I learn from them as well. IN short, I do not teach students what to think, I teach them how to think critically and how to produce their own knowledge. I combine anthropological holism with practical experiential learning environments to encourage students to consider the underpinnings of their basic assumptions about the way the world is and works and what they might consider doing to change their world if they find it not to their liking.

Students’ success after they graduate is the proof of how well this works. Numerous students have gone on to do fully-funded research degrees, had successful early careers in their chosen fields, and completely reassessed their life goals and pursued what truly is important to them rather than what they have been told is important leading to richer, more fulfilling lives.

Dr Carter’s life, education, and career has taken him to various places around the world. Prior to coming to the University of Brighton, He was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Newport (now University of South Wales), Research Fellow in the School of Anthropological Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. Cloud State University (Minnesota) and Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos.

His educational training consisted of both practical experience – as medical interpreter, cultural/educational liaison, contract researcher, and NGO worker and volunteer – and formal education. He earned his PhD and MA at the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque), where his doctoral research focused on the politics of Cuban identity articulated through the national sport of baseball. He was one of the first foreign scholars allowed into Cuba with the thawing of international relations between the US and Cuba in the 1990s and attended seminars at the Universidad de Habana during his 1990s fieldwork. His undergraduate education was completed at St. Cloud State University augmented through additional education at Universidad Laica Vicente Rocafuerte de Guayaquil (La LAICA) in Guayaquil, Ecuador.