tl;dr

Timorese capoeira session on the beach in Dili, East Timor. Image by the UN, credit Martine Perret

I am an American/British amateur anthropologist, an ex-“aid worker” looking to work on transformational projects involving communication, technology and new economies. I am seeking out flashes of the possible, bold alternatives.

My special skills seem hard to fit in traditional labels, but seem to coalesce into three areas:

accompanying online or offline communities and creating bridges between them

finding common languages which transcend jargon and cultural barriers

creative approaches to promoting engagement and social change

I've always had a keen interest in design, and a little over a decade ago, I began to rediscover the world of design through classes in information design and service design.

For the past ten years I co-founded and co-directed The Restart Project, aiming to reduce electronic waste and transform our relationship to electronics.

Prior to this, I worked with @Verdade, Mozambique’s innovative, largest circulation newspaper and I worked as a consultant with the International Land Coalition on a project designed to help decentralize collection of data on large-scale land acquisition, sometimes called “land grabbing”.

I spent a lot of 2022 concentrating on my recovery from Covid, as I’ve been unwell since the first wave of the pandemic. During this pause, I deepened my interest in degrowth, sufficiency, and luddism (new and old).

I consider myself disabled by an energy impairment, and I'm not back to my pre-2020 health, but back working, with Rethinking Economics, a student movement attempting to throw a spanner in the ideological engine of neoliberalism.

I have a particular attachment to East Timor, provincial Mozambique, São Paulo, Portugal and my new home Nottingham in the East Midlands.

My email is

my email janet DOT gunter AT protonmail DOT com