Current PhD Students

Article

Dele Adeyemo - The Last Dark Continent

Dele Adeyemo - The Last Dark Continent

This thesis examines the position of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea as a frontier geography that throughout history has been critical to the transformation of global capital and the production of space. I hypothesise that the contemporary forces of planetary urbanisation are driven by logistical calculations that reveal an imaginary of Africa's Guinea coast as a logistical coastline, that has been present since our system of global trade coalesced into being out of the greed, filth, and intimate violence of the transatlantic slave trade. My research seeks to centre the African predicament in the logistical turn of capital within a wider field on black studies. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach my practice led research creates intersections between the discourse on critical urban studies, genealogies of logistics, and black feminist theory, to provide a framework for architectural analysis and experimentation in black aesthetic and political practice.

Sam Nightingale - Spectral Materialism

A Crystalline World (2017), photographic salt print

Spectral Materialism is an original theoretical concept and visual approach that seeks to re-imagineand re-image the encounter between time, technology and materiality of site. I explore how time-based media can be enacted as a mediating technology that opens up the possibility for another (counter) visuality to come to presence – one in which the visible, invisible, material, immaterial, human and non-human have equal standing. Spectral Materialism opens up the possibility for what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls a ‘countervisuality’: an aesthetics that is counter to the visual regimes that produce subject-object and nature-culture separations complicit in the rise in the Anthropocene.

Tomas Percival - The Right to Insecurity

Thermal Imaging Surveillance

My practice-based PhD emerges from the urgent need to both understand and challenge the ways in which the complex logics of security have transformed spaces, bodies, and rights. Over the last two decades, we have witnessed the proliferation and intensification of various security assemblages in the UK, from the ‘hostile environment’ policies to the ubiquity of surveillance infrastructures. This PhD examines these heterogeneous and defused systems of control, alongside forms of activism and fugitivity that have emerged in response to these punitive geographies. In doing so, the thesis seeks to develop the notion of the ‘right to insecurity’ as a critical framework for intervening into the nexuses of securitisation. I am investigating these conditions through a series of UK-based case studies.

Riccardo Badano - Untamed Borders

Untamed Borders is an investigation into the weaponisation of environmental conditions put in place to hinder migrants’ circulations across the alpine arc. By directing migration trajectories outside urban areas, European border agencies intentionally stage the encounter between asylum seekers and the harsh physicality of the Alps: in the last years, hundreds of those who have attempted border crossings, often without any food, water and proper equipment have been severely injured in the confrontation with extreme temperatures. Responsibility for those accidents has been systematically re-directed toward the ‘wilderness’, a shifting definition conceived for the occasion as a ‘space’ outside the domains of politics. This research looks at the interplay between the materiality of the alpine landscape and migration policies to re-position the un-taming of the Alps – the mobilisation of nonhuman actors such plants, animals, and biophysical elements in the making of the border – as a mode of deterring secondary movements of migrants within the European Union.

Aslı Uludağ - Sustainable Grounds

The dichotomy of Life and Nonlife, Povinelli states, fuels late liberal geontopower (2016). This delineation governs the devastated environment of the Büyük Menderes Graben, the Denizli Graben and the Gediz Graben in Turkey through geothermal energy production. This project focuses on the toxic manifestations of this process to complicate notions of ‘sustainable technology’ and ‘renewable resource’ and reveals how sustainability is utilised to make the Anthropocene and the climate crisis productive for late liberal governance. Through a performative and aesthetic practice of sensing, I follow the manifestations of the deep subsurface on the surface (toxic or otherwise) to explore the practices and the worlds that have emerged from the particular surface/deep subsurface relations in these grabens. This allows me to conceptualise the ground as a matter-space that is in constant flux and imagine a sustainability that engages with the deep subsurface through its agency in making worlds.

Avi Varma - Sensory Borderlands

My PhD investigates the sensory practices, legal forms, and modes of testimony that emerge out of a colonial idea of nature as both abundant and nonlife: as a resource, as always yielding, as inexhaustible, as something that can be taken advantage of because it has no agency. Engaging with prison ecologies and so-called "desert" ecologies of the US southwest in relation to the natural infrastructures of the Rio Grande River, Sensory Borderlands considers the ways in which kinaesthetic, haptic and spatial processes such as air flow, water flow, groundwater exhaustion, vegetal proliferation, and physical movement in various environments/atmospheres become sites of assembly, political agency and epistemic struggle.

David Birkin - Grounded

I am proposing to research what I call a neo-imperial aerial imaginary and the role it has played in the construction of post-imperial British national identity and subjectivity. From airline slogans and air force propaganda to drone surveillance and deportation flights, the aircraft and the aerial has become an emblem of imperialist ideology. In using the aerial as a lens through which to study how the mythologies and iconographies of Britain’s legitimising discourses have projected an image of neocolonial power that re-inscribes concepts of nationalism, paternalism, consumerism, and class, I also investigate the view from below alongside various acts of resistance that have ‘grounded’ fighter jets and halted deportation flights.

Julia Nueno Guitart - Digital Autonomia

My research explores agency and collectivity under data-based decision-making, focusing on digital and platform labour. I investigate the ways in which management algorithms, underpinned by data extraction, mathematical modelling, and surveillance technologies, become mediums for exploitation, and disposession. My approach unfolds from two distinct instances: firstly, demystifying the property regimes and aesthetic processes that delimit and abstract knowledge, and skills; secondly, investigating workers’ experiences of solidarity, uncomputable knowledge and high-tech luddism that combine to resist precarisation of labour and new forms of subordination. In turn, my proposal is both critical and an invitation to subversion: in a data-dense environment, can labourers optimise algorithms to switch their allegiance? Can instances of resistance be woven into forms of digital organising?
FA Open Verification Fellowship

Leila Sibai - Haunting Assad's Syria

By looking into instances of state violence and dissidence in Syria since 2011, ‘Haunting Assad's Syria’ proposes to explore the relationship between body, voice, dissent, and state violence, and the role of language in registering related events, conditions, and imaginaries. This research project looks into governmental practices which have, as their rationale, the production of uniform political subjectivities and examine the mechanisms through which they hold the potential to nullify dissenting voices and generate dominant narratives. In translating to and from Arabic, this research practice attempts to develop linguistic and performative strategies to challenge established power dynamics and activate the transformative potential of language in connecting the self and the collective. Chase-AHRC Studentship.

Linda Schilling Cuellar - Landscape Ledgers

A new reading of environmental conflicts through Environmental Impact Assessment records for extraction infrastructure in Chile 1993-2022

My research analyses different forms of spatial representation inside Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). Cartographies, remote sensing imaging, modeling exercises, and their misreadings, can contribute to how extraction infrastructure projects are communicated and contested by communities before construction, adding to new ways of relating to the environment, such as citizen baselining and citizen monitoring of environmental impacts triggered by these projects. Visual Cultures Scholarship

Roisin Agnew - Emerald Extractivism

My research seeks to investigate how different modes of extraction operate in the Irish terrain, where mining prospecting, the proliferation of data centres, and the endangerment of boglands intersect with histories of colonial, state, and capitalist violence that haunt the Irish landscape to this day. The Irish terrain is foundational in the creation of mythologies of national identity and imperial brutality, and it remains a site of sectarian and economic contention. As the prospect of a United Ireland gains feasibility and as the depletion of its natural resources intensifies, a reconceptualisation of Irish land imaginaries is necessary in order to speculate on its (lost) futures and reconcile with its pasts. The research looks at the Irish terrain as a site of extractivism via the medium of landscape film, which itself uses land as a sensory plane from which to extrapolate meaning.