Ivan is a DPhil candidate and graduate tutor at the School of Anthropology. His doctoral thesis is a spatial ethnography of Tibetan migrant youths at the time of Tibet’s greatest labour transition to date: from an agrarian economy based on farming and nomadic pastoralism towards a largely urban one driven by the growth of the tertiary sector. Based on eighteen months of intensive language training and fieldwork in Lhasa—the capital of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region—the thesis explores why young Tibetan rural migrants move to Lhasa and how they use the space of the city. This spatial analysis—grounded in practice theory and based on participant observation—aims at gauging the extent to which these young Tibetans embrace Beijing-style modernization and urbanization at different times during their period of residence in Lhasa.
Ivan has a degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
He is also an alumnus of Tibet University and the United World College of the Adriatic and has previously worked on the urban research team of Westminster think-tank Policy Exchange.
Publications
Costantino, I. 2012. Spinning Lhasa: ritual circumambulation routes as liminal urbanscapes in China’s ’Western treasure-house’, in Andrews, H. and L. Roberts (eds) Liminal landscapes: travel, experience and spaces in-between. London: Routledge. To Be Published 5th April 2012.
Costantino, I. 2010. Review of P. Connerton. How modernity forgets, in Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford. 2: 1-2, 86-90.
Landscapes of the Western Pacific: anthropology and the land of ethnography in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, in Anthropological Imagination: Sussex Journal of Anthropology. UNDER REVIEW.