Dr Anthony Ince

(he/him)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My research to date has engaged with a range of topics, largely in the Global North, across a number of interweaving empirical themes:

• Multiculturalism, migration, and living with diversity: this has included work on fascism and anti-fascism, encounters of difference, hospitality, and labour market change.
• Agency and grassroots mobilisation: exploring issues such as labour agency and social movements.
• Territory and the state in a shifting world: this has involved critical engagements with theories of the state and 'statism', and activist territorialities.
• Anarchist theory: exploring concepts such as autonomy, self-management and mutual aid as both analytical tools and normative agendas.

I welcome enquiries regarding PhD supervision on any area of my expertise.

Current and recent projects

Contesting the 'good citizen': Political conflict and local civic life - 2024-25

This project is funded by two Mid-Career Fellowships from the British Academy and the Independent Social Research Foundation. It investigates how local and neighbourhood civic life and notions of citizenship can variously create or inhibit opportunity structures for political conflict, with a particular focus on far-right and anti-immigrant attitudes. In practice, the project uses a deep ethnography in two provincialised communities in Bristol, UK, to test and nuance understandings in the wider literature about factors influencing voting patterns and social attitudes. Additionally, I will develop a toolkit for supporting communities through finding inclusive responses to polarising issues and debates - locally, nationally and globally.

The far right, antifascism and the production of political space - 2019-present

Partly funded by a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust small grant, this work explores the overlaps, linkages and tensions between antifascist and far right spatial strategies. I have been exploring the spatial and strategic interactions between the far right and their opponents in order to explore forms of antifascism that engage critically but meaningfully with often-problematic popular imaginaries (e.g. nationhood) and 'mainstream' political-cultural values. In particular, I engage critically with notions of citizenship, 'civility' and the political centre, using antifascism as a lens for considering radical and alternative formations of civic virtue, especially at the local and neighbourhood scale.

'Post-statist' geographies - 2013-present

Working with Geronimo Barrera de la Torre (University of California - Berkeley), this theoretical project develops a new frame of reference for state theory in geography and beyond. Drawing from a constructively critical reading of anarchist and decolonial critiques of the modern state, this project seeks to decentre the state from our underlying assumptions about the world and our place in it. Our book, Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order was published in May 2024 by Pluto Press.

Past Projects

Anti-Fascist Action and the spatial strategies of militant antifascism - 2018-2020

This was a small archival and oral history project (funded by Cardiff University), investigating the controversial but highly effective militant anti-fascism of Anti-Fascist Action in 1990s Britain. Critically assessing their ideology and carefully calculated spatial strategies can help to inform our understanding of progresive forms of working class whiteness in the contemporary period of heightened racial tension.

Urban riots: a comparative study of London (2011) and Stockholm (2013) - 2017-2021

This project (funded by FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council) is a collaboration with colleagues at Stockholm University, investigating the long-term legacies and impacts of urban riots on local communities. Using a comparative urban lens, the project is the first of its kind to investigate the diverse continuities and changes instigated by riots, incorporating the intersecting dimensions of policy, materiality, memory and agency.

Global voluntary exchange networks: backpacking and mutual aid among strangers - 2013-2017

This project combined long-term ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews to investigate the production of global networks of informal mutual aid and hospitality among travellers and their hosts. Using case studies including couch-surfing, labour exchange networks, and hitchhiking, the project used the organisation of, and relations within, these moneyless economies to illuminate debates on encounter, hospitality, and mutuality in a global and mobile world.

Globalisation, labour markets and communities in contemporary Britain - 2010-2012

Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this project worked with a team at the University of Glasgow to explore how local communities and established workforces responded to changing labour markets in a period of large-scale migration flows, especially between Eastern and Western Europe. Drawing on three case studies of local-scale campaigns and conflict in the UK, the project highlighted the agency of local workforces and communities to develop their own narratives and responses to in-migration which were generally quite inclusive, but structural factors linked to EU and UK policy militated against what could have become bottom-up expressions of working-class solidarity.

Teaching

Note: Between September 2024 and August 2026 I will be away from teaching on a research fellowship. Please note that I continue to be available for new PhD applications during this period.

I enjoy teaching students of all levels and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Modules I currently teach or have recently taught include:

• Border Spaces (first year undergraduate, core)
• Political Geography (second year undergraduate, option)
• Spaces of Production: Economic Geography (second year undergraduate, option)
• Geographies of Race and Power (final year undergraduate, option)
• Urban Theory Provocations (postgraduate, option)
• Undergraduate Research Dissertations (final year undegraduate, core)

PhD Students

• Primary PhD supervisor for Owain Hanmer (with Prof Gary Bridge): Owain's work cuts across food geographies, political theory and political economy to investigate the contested politics of food through the lens of anarchism, pragmatism and the foundational economy. Owain successfully defended his thesis in December 2021.
• Second supervisor for Juan Usubillaga Narvaez (with Prof Aseem Inam): Using a comparative study of Bogota and Berlin, Juan's thesis studies the ways in which autonomous forms of urban activism constitute a form of urban design practice.

Biography

After completing an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Politics at the University of Liverpool, I won an Economic and Social Research Council 1+3 award to undertake a Masters and PhD at the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. My MA thesis investigated DIY forms of architecture and community planning among the 1970s squatting movement in London, and my doctoral research considered the spatial strategies of anarchist-inspired forms of horizontal community and workplace organisation.

At the completion of my PhD in 2010, I was employed on a Joseph Rowntree Foundation project at the University of Glasgow, working with Andrew Cumbers, David Featherstone, Danny MacKinnon and Kendra Strauss. This project used three case studies to explore the lived negotiations of, and responses to, migration and labour market change in the UK.

Following this, I took two years outside formal academic employment, travelling, working and volunteering across Europe and Asia. On my return to the UK, I secured a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University.

I came to Cardiff to join the School of Geography and Planning as a Lecturer in Human Geography in September 2015 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. You can find out more about my work since joining Cardiff under the 'research' and 'teaching' tabs. 

Professional memberships

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (awarded 2018)

Supervisions

I welcome expressions of interest for PhD supervision across the broad remit of my research specialisms. In particular, I am keen to hear from prospective PhD students interested in the following areas:

• Politics of migration and living in diversity
• Fascist and anti-fascist movements
• Anarchist politics and practice

Prospective students are also welcome to contact me about studies linked to other areas of my research expertise (please see 'research' and 'overview' tabs for more information).

Current supervision

Juan Usubillaga Narvaez

Teaching Associate in Urban Design and Planning

Past projects

Owain Hanmer (2018-2021) Retirement and the everyday politics of commoning in urban gardens. Principal supervisor.