Julia Perczel is a social anthropologist working at the confluence of economic and environmental anthropology trying to understand the world of market-based solutions to the environmental crisis. She had studied at SOAS, Central European University, Budapest and the University of Manchester. She has received funding for her masters at SOAS from HEFCE and for her research from a range of sources including a studentship from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute. She has also held a pre-doctoral visiting fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department for Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge funded by the ESRC. 

Her interests range from the waste trade as a social mobility strategy for marginalized sections of society and the social effects and portrayals of working with toxic substances. At the heart of her research are the contradictory effects of market logic in environmental sustainability projects. She is currently working on converting my doctoral thesis into a book on e-waste recycling in India titled “The Value of Waste: value transformations in the e-waste sphere in India’s green transition.” While at the same time she is conducting fieldwork on a new project on regulating solid waste movements in the Indian Himalayas titled “The world’s highest rubbish dump: a Himalayan Anthropocene” funded by The Leverhulme Trust.