Centre for Research Architecture Research Projects
Read more about the research projects being pursued by our staff.
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Forensic Architecture
Forensic Architecture undertakes advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organisations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations.
Hostile Environments
Hostile Environments refers to a process of making space unliveable for some. It bears an eerie resemblance with the ways in which other, more “natural” environments have been turned into spaces of hostility for migrants. It aims to rethink conventional understandings of both environment and displacement and to connect struggles around migration, borders and environmental justice in new, unexpected ways.
Learning from Ice
Learning from Ice investigates the politics of cold focusing on cryospheric environments from the Circumpolar North to tropical mountain glaciers in the Himalayas. It examines the ways in which these ecologies operate as vast information networks composed of material as well as socio- cultural sensors.
It aims to highlight the many different practices that produce situated knowledge of climate change from the study of the past using ice cores to the lived experiences of communities and local observations of indigenous people. It locates itself within the emergent field of the Ice Humanities.
Learning from Stuart Hall: Exhibition 2014
CRA PhD students created an exhibition that explored the intellectual, activist, and pedagogical contributions of Stuart Hall. Along the ground-floor corridor the students questioned what it means to name a building after a person. On the lower-ground floor the exhibition interrogates the “Research Excellence Framework” which quantifies and evaluates academic outputs, assesses their impacts and ranks the university.
These schematised metrics are counter-posed by a broad range of materials drawn from Stuart Hall’s influential career as a founder of cultural studies, teacher, writer, publisher, and activist to raise questions about the nature of the “new academic”.
Michel Feher: The Age of Appreciation 2013-15
Neoliberalism has defined a brave new capitalist world in which financial markets preside over the allocation of resources. Investors not only reap an exorbitant rent from the production of others, they are also invested with the power to decide what is worth producing.
This lecture series argues that the rule of investors proves as transformative of personal motivation and conduct as of corporate management and statecraft. Just as with previous shifts in governing practices, a new representation of human potential and human frailties—a distinctively neoliberal perspective on the human condition—is implicated in the financial turn of capitalism. .
Investee Activism Workshop: 2013-15
The purpose of this workshop (run over the duration of Michel Feher's time at Goldsmiths as Visiting Professor) was to delineate the domain of “investee activism”: identifying the specific mode of social antagonism defined by each financial market—stakeholder activism in the stock market, borrower activism in the bond market, collateral guarantor activism in the derivatives market—surveying the existing cases of social movements predicated on the investor vs. investee nexus, especially in the wake of the real estate and banking crises of 2008 and speculating on the potential development of such activism.