Joanna Cook

Joanna Cook is a Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her books include Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press) and Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (Cambridge University Press).

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Jo’s research interests focus primarily on the UK and Thailand and extend across a range of different theoretical questions:  the anthropology of joy; monasticism, gender and ethics in Buddhist Thailand; mindfulness, politics and well-being in the UK; power in Southeast Asia; detachment as an ethnographic object and as a theoretical tool; democracy, subjectivity and sociality; the anthropology of intellectual exchange.