Dr. Thomas John McNamara

Visited the IAS from January to February 2023

Dr. Thomas McNamara is a Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the Deputy Director of the Master of International Development and a lecturer in that program. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) and a PhD in Development Studies from The University of Melbourne. His key interest is how Global South economies are shaped by and guide affective relationships and moral norms, especially norms relating to ‘development’. He has followed this interest to explore development-inspired moral economies in Malawi and trade unions on Zambia’s Copperbelt. Between 2016 and 2019 he was a post-doctoral researcher on Working Mining, a European Research Council project at the University of Liege, where he now holds an FNRS mandate. Thomas is the author of many works critically examining the interplay of development and economics in Africa that have been published, for example, in The Journal of The Royal Anthropology Institute, Third World Quarterly, and Dialectical Anthropology. Before joining academia Thomas worked with Spectrum: Sustainable Development Knowledge Network, a human rights organization in Myanmar. He is active in a practitioner space, assisting trade unions in the Global South and he is an editor of Development in Practice and Dialectical Anthropology.