Read about our staff and their research interests.
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Research Director Professor Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.The author of over 15 books, he has held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
In 2019 he was elected life fellow of the British Academy and appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture. In 2020 he was elected the Richard von Weizsäcker fellow at the Bosch Academy.Eyal studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London.
Susan Schuppli is an artist-researcher and writer. Through investigative processes that involve an engagement with scientific and technical modes of inquiry, her work aims to open up new conceptual pathways into the material strata of our world. he has published widely within the context of media and politics and as an author of Material Witness (MIT Press 2020), which is also the subject of an experimental documentary.
While many projects have examined media artefacts—photographs, film, video, and audio transmissions—that have emerged out of sites of contemporary conflict and state violence, current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the arctic are producing an “extreme image” archive of material wrongs. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe as well as in Canada, Asia and the US. SShe is an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Previously she was Senior Research Fellow and Project Co-ordinator of Forensic Architecture. In 2016 she received the ICP Infinity Award for Research and Critical Writing.
Stafford is a community activist and race equality specialist with over 30 years of experience in anti-racist advocacy work. In 2020, he was named as one of “100 Great Black Britons” for his contributions to activism and race relations in the UK. Beginning as a youth worker on the Broadwater Farm Estate in 1983, he led the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign on behalf of the Tottenham Three—whose convictions for the murder of PC Blakelock were overturned in 1991.
Stafford has worked amongst different agencies, including Waltham Forest Housing Association, the Department of Health and The Kings Fund, providing grassroots solutions to issues of institutional racism affecting the Black community, whilst continuing to support local communities with issues around over-policing, miscarriages of justice and deaths in custody.
Tottenham Rights was initiated as a CIC and a subsidiary of The Monitoring Group (TMG), responding to the police killing of Mark Duggan in 2011 and the UK-wide public disturbances that followed. Working within TMG as an advocate and senior caseworker for eight years, alongside Tottenham Rights cases, Stafford has most recently begun challenging the Metropolitan Police on their discriminatory practices using the Gangs Matrix, use of tasers and other corrupt practices impacting the Black community. Stafford has been a consistent contributor to the Guardian since 2011 and has written for various publications, including writing 'A Dialogue of Equals' and 'The Governments Bogus War on Gangs’.
Working within the framework of the Centre for Research Architecture's post-graduate curriculum, the Scotts will expand on their "War Inna Babylon" style narrations of Black British histories and campaigning strategies that were featured in their collaborative ICA exhibition, through the development of a series of lectures, workshops, and projects. These activities will provide students across Goldsmiths with the opportunity to utilise a range of technological and research skills to investigate human rights infringements across the globe.
Guest Professor Kamara Scott
Kamara Scott is a creative producer. After working as a primary interviewer on the 2011 LSE Guardian joint research project, Reading the Riots, she went on to study Politics and Social Policy at Brighton University. She has since worked at The Monitoring Group as an assistant caseworker, following which she became a criminal defence paralegal at Imran Khan and Partners Solicitors, developing a keen interest in community responses to policing, actions against the police and institutional racism across the legal system.
Most recently, she has initiated a more creative route, producing filmed and recorded content with various agencies, centring on Black storytelling of culture and community, and was co-curator of War Inna Babylon at the ICA.
Working within the framework of the Centre for Research Architecture's post-graduate curriculum, the Scotts will expand on their "War Inna Babylon" style narrations of Black British histories and campaigning strategies that were featured in their collaborative ICA exhibition, through the development of a series of lectures, workshops, and projects. These activities will provide students across Goldsmiths with the opportunity to utilise a range of technological and research skills to investigate human rights infringements across the globe.
Senior Lecturer Dr Ghalya Saadawi
Ghalya Saadawi teaches the MA module Conflicts & Negotiations and the Critical Methods workshop for PhDs.Her interests broadly span art and political economy, theories of witnessing and testimony, psychoanalysis and marxism, critical legal theory, Lebanese art and politics, among others. Saadawi's doctoral dissertation underscored the art practices and theoretical considerations that informed a rethinking of witnessing, representation, and ideology after the declared end of the Lebanese civil wars.
Between 2011 and 2019, she was adjunct lecturer at the American University of Beirut and from 2015 to 2017, Resident Professor of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program. Saadawi is currently theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute ArtEZ University of the Arts. Most recent publications include “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic” in PhiloSOPHIA (2022), and “Vapid Virtues, Real Stakes: Diagnosis for Left Art Protocols” in Between the Material and the Possible Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art, edited by Bassam El Baroni (2022). She is at work on a long essay of fragments on tradition, modernity, loss, death, and cultural obsessions with the past, and a manuscript on hypochondria as a figure of critique. Saadawi is a member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR).
Christina Varvia convenes the MA stream in Forensic Architecture. Former Deputy Director and Lead Researcher of Forensic Architecture (FA), Christina joined the FA team in 2014 and held a variety of roles, from leading investigations and overseeing research and the development of new methodologies, to setting up office structures. She is trained as an architect at the Architectural Association (AA) and Westminster University, and has taught a Diploma unit (MArch) at the AA (2018-2020).
She was also a member of the Technology Advisory Board for the International Criminal Court (2018). Christina is pursuing her PhD at Aarhus University where her research focuses on biopolitics and imaging of the human body. She has received the Novo Nordisk Foundation Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for Practice-based Artistic Research and is also a fellow at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. She is a founding member and the chair of the board of Forensis, the Berlin-based association established by FA.
Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, theorist and artist, based in London. His research interests include contemporary art, critical theory, postwar liberation movements, modern and contemporary musicality, cybernetic theory, the cinematic soundtrack and archaeologies of futurity. In 2002, he founded The Otolith Group together with Anjalika Sagar. Their essayistic approach reflects on the perception and nature of documentary practice through films, texts and activities related to media archives. The Otolith Group were nominated for The Turner Prize in 2010 and have exhibited internationally since 2003.
Kodwo is author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (2020), and Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (2012), co-editor of The Fisher Function (2017), Post Punk Then and Now (2016), The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue (2011), Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom (2010) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998 (2007).
Lecturer Dr Louis Moreno
Louis Moreno’s research, teaching and writing explores the spatial relationships and political economic forces that shape the social and cultural forms of everyday life. Specialising in urbanism and spatial theory, Louis’s academic background spans literature and philosophy, architectural history, urban geography and political theory.
His PhD research examined the urban incubation and architectural effects of financialised capitalism in post-industrial Britain. His current research examines the urban processes and cultural logic of financialised capitalism. Louis is a member of the research collective freethought, who co-curated the Bergen Assembly 2016 in Norway. He is also the joint program leader of the BA in History of Art at Goldsmiths. Louis's research explores the spatial, historical, and cultural systems of financial capitalism, with a particular focus on architecture, urbanism, and the cultures of everyday life. Louis is a member of the research collective freethought, who are currently fellows of BAK in Utrecht developing a new project on ‘Spectral Infrastructures’. Louis is also a part of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective.
Tomas Percival is an artist and researcher. His work investigates the spatial politics of securitisation, specifically in relation to questions of algorithmic governance, punitive geographies, bureaucracy, and rights. He holds an MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio programme at UCLA, and has participated in residencies at SOMA and the Jan van Eyck Academie. Previously, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University.
His projects have been exhibited in Europe and the United States. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture.
Lecturer Dr Ifor Duncan
Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist and inter-disciplinary researcher who focuses on political violence and watery ecosystems. He is Lecturer in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, and has previously held the position of postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at the New Institute Centre for the Environmental Humanities (NICHE), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he remains a research affiliate.
Ifor holds a PhD from CRA entitled Hydrology of the Powerless and is developing a book project Necro-Hydrology,a conceptwhich exists where the knowledge and corresponding management of water in all its forms is produced as adversarial to marginalised communities and positions human and environmental justice as always intrinsically connected. Ifor has also been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, and has been a visiting tutor at the Dutch Art Institute and the Rachel Carson Centre.
Lorenzo Pezzani previously convened the MA stuido in Forensic Architecture (2017-22). An architect and PhD graduate from the Centre, his work deals with the spatial politics and visual cultures of migration, with a particular focus on the geography and history of the ocean. His current research focuses on Border Forensics is an agency that mobilises innovative methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence.
Border Forensics is an agency mobilising innovative methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence, wherever this violence might take place. Working collaboratively with migrant communities and non-governmental groups, we aim to promote and defend the dignity and rights of migrants and to foster mobility justice.
Border Forensics builds upon the work that we have conducted over the last 10 years within the Forensic Oceanography project, through which we have sought to critically investigate the militarised border regime imposed by European states across the EU’s maritime frontier. While the Mediterranean remains one of the deadliest border zone in the world, we have set up Border Forensics as a non-profit association based in Geneva to conduct research and carry out investigations with and in support of communities exposed to border violence – broadly understood as the different forms of harm resulting from the existence and management of borders, wherever this violence takes place.
We operate at the intersection of four different domains. In our critical Human Rights work, we generate evidence of violations and contest the (il)legality of bordering practices, all the while interrogating and challenging the limits of strategic litigation and forensic work. Technology provides us with the practical tools and know-how to understand how border surveillance operates and devise new tools of documentation that can be shared with non-governmental groups fighting border violence. Our Research allows us to locate particular practices of border violence within a broader social and historical context of highly uneven (im)mobilities. It also provides a critical space to interrogate the ethical and political dilemmas that we encounter in our work. Arts and Architecture based strategies provides us with crucial means of visual and spatial spatial analysis. Through exhibitions and public events, we explore how borders themselves operate visually and spatially, all the while attempting to challenge the boundaries of what can be seen and heard.
Border Forensics produces human rights reports, maps, video reconstructions and other visualisations that ground demands of accountability for the violation of migrants’ rights and support claims for the identification of the deceased. Our findings have been presented in national and international courts and people’s tribunals, discussed in parliaments and political assemblies of various kinds, published in the international press and academic journals, and featured in exhibitions and public events.
Reader Dr. Başak Ertür
Başak Ertür is the author of Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (Fordham University Press, 2022) and a recipient of the Association for the Study of Law Culture and Humanities Julien Mezey Dissertation Award (2016). She has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2022-23. She is the editor of Manual for Conspiracy (2011) and co-editor of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (2008), as well as Something Is Rotten in the State, a special issue of Theory & Event.
Recent articles have appeared in Critical Times, Law & Critique, Theory & Event and in the edited collections Vulnerability in Resistance and Law, Memory, Violence: Uncovering the Counter-Archive. Başak has translated work by Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Val Plumwood into Turkish.
She is also the co-director and co-producer of the documentary film, For the Record: The World Tribunal on Iraq (2007). Başak serves on the advisory board of Forensis, and the editorial committee of Law & Critique.
Each year research and postdoctoral fellows as well as international visiting scholars spend a portion of their time at the Centre for Research Architecture participating in seminars and presenting their work.
Past postdoctoral fellows and visiting scholars have included Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jamon van Den Hoek, Alessandro Petti, Ayesha Hameed, Patrick Kroker, Ana Medina, Stephen Turner, and Runa Johannessen.
