Dr Kathleen Bryson

I am the Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Oxford Martin Programme on Women’s Equality.

I was born in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, and raised on the Kenai Peninsula. I received my PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from UCL in 2017, and previously was awarded my MA in Independent Film from what is now UAL, and two BA degrees in Anthropology and Swedish, respectively, from the University of Washington. I additionally studied a year of Nordic Archaeology (Honours) at Stockholm University as a Swedish speaker, specialising in the Viking Age.

My doctorate was followed by lecturing and then a postdoctoral research position at QMUL that focused on social identity theory and older adults. I specialise in ambiguity tolerance, evolutionary theory and social identity theory applied to ingroup/outgroup distinctions, including androcentrism, heterosexism and speciesism. Within the WEIR programme I therefore look forward to researching bias and favouritism applied to women’s education and employment, particularly aspects of women’s unpaid — and often statistically untabulated — labour.

Research Interests

My research interests include androcentrism, dehumanisation, prejudice and bias, ingroups/outgroups, ambiguity tolerance, essentialism, the evolution of primate bisexual behaviour, cyborg studies and human-animal studies.

My wider essentialism research explores if and how polarised thought patterns and corresponding classifications are protected or made malleable, thus complementing my earlier work on infrahumanisation, dehumanisation, essentialism and speciesism. I currently am co-writing a book with Volker Sommer entitled The Quiddity Question: Essentialism, Ambiguity Tolerance and Ultrahumanisation. This monograph focuses on classic modes of essentialised othering (Human–Animal, Human–Machine, Male–Female, Heterosexual–Homosexual) that were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed for my doctoral thesis, and provides evidence of similar temporal patterns of British ambiguity (in)tolerance across three out of four cultural dichotomies – including a distinct “millennial effect” of intolerance circa the year 2000 – and a remarkably stable Male–Female dichotomy.

An artist-writer-filmmaker long before I ever was a social scientist, my most recently published book is The Stagtress, a novel rooted in part in Frazer’s anthropological fever dream The Golden Bough (Fugue State Press, 2019).

More information can be found at www.kathleenbryson.com or on my art Instagram page at https://www.instagram.com/kathleen.bryson