Current PhD Students

My research explores architecture, blackness and being.

My research focuses on the processes of the built environment in its larger context and more specifically, in regards to its relationship with nature. I employ different mediums including video, text and objects. My PhD project highlights the various modes of scientific measuring processes tackling the weather and the sea in the context of Lebanon. It considers the coastal dynamics as a site for the entanglement between regulations, capitalism, politics and social / spatial / construction practices.

During the long summer of migration, in 2015, the Aegean sea, with its territorial waters, contiguous and contested economic zones, patrol areas and shorelines, was crossed more than a million times by people migrating to Europe on unseaworthy vessels. It is since narrated as a space of death, diaspora, displacement and liminality, a barrier separating two continents; Europe and Asia. Throughout my research, I attempt to map out fissures; disjunctions in the EU border apparatus and the registration and detention regimes it engenders. The hidden, the undocumented, and the aquatic fold into my work, as I attempt to negotiate a strategy for imperceptibility, and, ultimately, for flight from the territorialising forces of the sovereign state. Onassis Foundation Scholarship

Bridging acoustic ecology studies with oceanography and environmental theory, this project reflects about our understandings of the ocean as a dynamic milieu that challenges environmental politics. Rendering the sonic ocean, I will analyse the technologies for mapping, sensing and capturing the oceanic space,reflecting how varying forms of spectral analysis lead to different ecosystem constructs. This project further aims to speculate how forms of oceanic counter-literacy, such as modes of sonic resistance and conservation can operate with precautionary measure by creating a practical work group with a coalition of NGOs in the North Atlantic, while aiming to deconstruct the extractive mentality and the partitioning of the environment by politics and epistemologies.

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.

When struggles around infrastructure developments appear in public against the limits of the land, water and social reproduction, the imperialism of structural adjustment by infrastructure appears takes the plain view, also in the recruitment of community into grassroots installs of corporate investment socialities. The sheer scale of present-day developments across the planet, combined with the gap left by increasing value uniformity, neutral branding, and singular vocabularies of extinction-oriented ‘best practice’, creates epistemic-political rifts and gaps of symbolic opportunity, where religious, environmental, new labour, indigenous and subaltern communities have been able to differently occupy, and challenge, in turn, the ‘fundamentalist’ dimension of late capitalist developmentalism, thus querying the category of the infrastructural itself.

This research project investigates the mobilisation of soils as a laboratory for economic, juridical, and environmental experiments that enabled the transition from colonial forms of power towards neoliberal governance. From the perspective of what I term “soil politics”, colonisation operates through the land, and continues to materialise in the present with the modification of soil’s chemical properties.

In particular, I focus the project on the global soil surveys initiated after the Second World War by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as a defining moment in the transformation of land from earthly matter into a techno-scientific assemblage, invested with the capacity to organise and unsettle modes of life. Through a combined analysis of cartographic and archival sources, interviews, and field work I examine the consequences of the implementation of the surveys’ directives at different scales in the present-day, to inquire into what the Soil Map of the World represents when experienced from the ground.

My research focuses on “seeing” into communities and geographies made “invisible” by the interests of the state. A focal point is the city of Gwadar, Pakistan, where a hegemonic, state-centred discourse of “globalisation” and “modernisation” and a conviction that there are no other futures or ways of being, justifies not only large scale infrastructure projects, but also the violence and dispossession that accompanies them. But what other ideas of “modernity” exist and can help break this cycle? What alternative imaginations of the future are available for us to work with? How do indigenous and local communities resist the acts of the state, and what does their resistance tell us about alternative ideas of progress, development and futures? Based on ethnographic work, my work uses fictional photography and film, graphic illustrations and architectural models, to “see” into these invisible spaces, and represent alternative modernities and visualise futures as yet unimagined and ‘invisible’. 

My research investigates the changing modes of investment in tropical nature arguing that zoological and botanical scientific objects offer an under-examined archive for tracing the complex geopolitical legacies of environmental and colonial violence and their attendant visual economies. I link colonial practices of “collecting” to current strategies for “banking” nature. I also trace practices of forest modification from the invention of Prussian forestry to the ongoing monocultural plantations of oil palm in Indonesia. My analysis of colonial scientific practices in Nusantara—through specimen collecting and forest modification—provides the historical basis against which I go on to investigate contemporary modes of investing in nature through “species banking” and “forest financialisation.” Chase-AHRC Studentship.