Miranda Sheild Johansson
Miranda Sheild Johansson is social anthropologist specialising in the dynamics of fiscal systems and the sociality of tax, with a particular emphasis on the Andean region. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL Anthropology. Her project, ‘Becoming a Tax Payer: Fiscal Expansion and Economic Subjectivities in Bolivia’, explores the experiences of recent rural-to-urban migrants as they encounter and make sense of expanding national tax structures into which they are being incorporated. Key areas of focus in Miranda’s work on tax include: indigenous perspectives on tax, decolonising tax, statecraft in Latin America, the relationship between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ money flows, fiscal exchange logics, and the Social Contract. Miranda is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the anthropology of tax and the author of the Tax entry in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. She has published pieces on Andean fiscal cultures in Social Analysis and History and Anthropology. She has also written on themes of agricultural labour, the value of productivity, and animate landscapes in highland Bolivia. Miranda received her PhD from the LSE in 2014, and has worked as a Teaching Fellow at UCL.