arts and society directorTiffany Jenkins
Dr Tiffany Jenkins is director of the arts and society programme at the Institute of Ideas.
Tiffany Jenkins is a sociologist, and a regular contributor to the broadsheet press on culture and the arts.
Her academic research explores challenges to authority in the cultural sector, concepts of cultural value, cultural policy, and cultural property issues such as repatriation and contested objects. These interests are underpinned by a study of authority and how today it has to continually justify itself and is constantly questioned and contested. Her research also examines the symbolic meanings and strategic use of human remains, and how the body becomes a locale for so many cultural, political, and ethical debates. And she is interested in cultural reflections on death, and memorialisation.
Her sociology PhD examined the construction of the problem of human remains in British museum collections with a weak social constructionist method. She is the author of Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: the crisis of cultural authority published by Routledge in Autumn 2010. She is writing a new book: Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of Antiquity Ended Up in Museums – And Why They Should Stay There, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.
Tiffany is a co-convenor of the British Sociological Association study group Sociologists Outside Academia which aims to raise the status of sociological work undertaken beyond an academic context.
Recent articles
Tiffany's website, which details her journalism, research, books, broadcasting and events can be read at tiffanyjenkinsinfo.wordpress.com.
