Research students

Albina Lindt’s thesis is dedicated to the study of EU-level renewable electricity and renewable fuels (mainly biofuels) legislation, encompassing the directives of 2001, 2003, 2009 and the ILUC directive. Within this policy area, she focuses on the formulation stage within the policy cycle. This implies a detailed reconstruction of policy-making processes aimed at stipulation of target values and definitions for renewable energy sources – two interrelated policy issues at the core of the directives. Carla pays special attention to the application of policy formulation tools, such as future scenario modelling, for the purpose of decision making. Being more generally interested in the different inputs of EU institutions into the policy formulation process, the overarching goal of the thesis is to assess the driving forces behind the legislative outcome.

Thesis Title 

“Neoliberalism and Puerto Rico from 1980-2016” (Working title)

Bio 

John Paul Belk is a M.Phil/Ph.D. candidate in Politics. His research is centered around political theory and political economy. Within these main areas, he mainly focuses on topics dealing with neoliberalism, debt, coloniality, governmentality, and discourse. Additionally, his work explores the political history of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and the U.S.

Summary


My research project will shed light on the nature of neoliberalism through a critical chronological examination of the ideology in Puerto Rico from 1980 to 2016. From this, I will extrapolate a precise conceptual understanding of how neoliberalism has behaved in the island, and settle on a workable definition of the ideology itself, contributing to the conversation about neoliberalism at large. My project will highlight how the ideology shifts and molds to different legal-political realities, how the island’s (post) colonial status has played a pivotal role in regards to neoliberalism, how neoliberalism shaped the state by way of public policy, discourse, and governance, and what its effects of neoliberalism on the island are today.

Academic Qualifications 

M.Phil/PhD candidate in Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London; 2019-present

M.A. in Political Theory, University of York, U.K; 2017

Master’s in Visual Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Catalonia; 2014

B.A. in History, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus; 2012

Thesis

Social Entrepreneurship Discourse(s) in Media, Policy and Practice:
The Case of Germany

Information about me

Philipp is working as a lecturer at the Berlin School of Economics and the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in the areas of social science, social economy and social entrepreneurship. His research and teaching comprises the intersection of ‘the economic’, ‘the social’ and ‘the political’, leading to investigations of how individuals, organizations or societies are organizing, or might want to organize, economic life. Philipp has published work on critical diversity (management) studies and on feminist perspectives on economics. He is also a trained secondary school teacher.

Research Interests

• The ‘SE field’: social entrepreneurship, social and solidarity economy, social enterprise
• Economics education and the plural economics debate
• Gender and diversity studies

Academic qualifications

• MEd Politics and English for Secondary Education, Freie Universität Berlin
• MA Social Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London
• BA International Political Studies, Middlesex University

Teaching

• Business, Organizations and Work (introductory social science course)
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Alternative Business Practices
• Qualitative Research Methods
• 'Human Costs' of Global Markets

Professional activities

Prior to being a lecturer and researcher at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, Philipp has worked at the Berlinale (International Film) Festival, at different startups and in sustainability consulting. Alongside his work in higher education, Philipp is also teaching Politics for students in secondary school (Gymnasium).

Featured work

Kenel, Philipp/Gather, Claudia/Lottmann, Ralf (2018): „Das war noch nie Thema hier, noch nie!“ Sexuelle Vielfalt in der Altenpflege – Perspektiven für ein Diversity Management. Pflege & Gesellschaft, 23 (3), pp. 211-227

Kenel, Philipp (2020): Interdisziplinäre Feministische Impulse für mehr Pluralismus in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften. In: Carl et al. (eds.): Geschlechterverhältnisse im Kontext von Unternehmen und Gesellschaft. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 15-34

Alongside my alma mater listed below, I have also studied at L’Institut d’Études Sciences Politiques de Paris and the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Conservatoire for Dance and Drama. Additionally, I have worked in collaboration with colleagues across several contexts, including the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, the British Library, Utrecht University, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

I am also currently the Secretary on the Political Studies Association’s Early Career Network Committee.

When I’m not working on my thesis, I enjoy gardening, knitting, reading fiction and philosophy, going to the cinema, the theatre, and dancing

Thesis

Title: All the women are white, all the Blacks are men, but what about the greens? – an intersectional analysis of UK environmentalism

My project works to further flesh out the links and gaps amongst de/postcolonialism, feminism, environmentalism, and social movement studies. Through interrogating the experiences, views, and praxis of social movement actors, my research aims to increase transnational learning amongst environmentalists in relation to inclusive action and philosophies of environmentalism.

My research is funded through the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Academic qualifications

• PhD Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London (in progress)
• MA Postcolonial Studies (Distinction) at University of Kent (2019 – 2020)
• BA (Hons) Politics and International Relations (1:1) at SOAS, University of London (2016 – 2019)

Research Interests

Social movements, politics of identity, migration, borders, intersectionality, feminist politics, environmental politics, critical theory, sustainability debates within the cultural sector, comparative politics

Publications

• Hiraide, L.A. (Forthcoming). Living and Resisting Intersectional Oppression Through Ballroom: Dreams and the Dreamlike in Pose (2019). In: Dreams and Atrocity: The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma, Otosaka, D. and Baker, E.R (eds.) Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Hiraide, L.A. (2022). “Re-centring Radical Rap and R&B: Cardi B and the Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure.” Brief Encounters. 6(6): 27-38. https://doi:10.24134/be.v6il.283
• Hiraide, L.A. (2022). “Ambivalent Borders and Hybrid Culture: The Role of Culture and Exclusion in Historical European Discourses of Migration.” Journal of European Studies. 52(2): 99-110. https://doi:10.1177/00472441221090719.
• Hiraide, L.A. (2022).  “Climate refugees – a useful concept? Towards an alternative vocabulary of ecological displacement.” Politics.  https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221077257
• Hiraide, L.A. Book Review: Transnational Black Feminism and Qualitative Research: Black Women, Racialization and Migration by Tanja J. Burkhard (2022), June 11th 2022, LSE Review of Books. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. La difficile tâche de définir les réfugiés climatiques, EuropaNova, May 2022. REPRINT. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. The Difficult Business of Defining Climate Refugees. Green European Journal, January 2022. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. 2022. Grounding Environmental Issues in the Social: A Short Response to David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet. the quint: an interdisciplinary quarterly from the north. 14(1): 178-186. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. Black and Southern Feminisms Matter in Global Climate Struggles, E-International Relations, December 2021. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. (2021). “What if we choose not to go back to normal?”. Reset - The Journal. Goldsmiths Racialised Postgraduate Network, Goldsmiths University Press, 1(1): 4-7.
• Hiraide, Lydia Ayame. 2021. ‘Postcolonial’, ‘decolonial’, or ‘anti-colonial’: Does it matter?, New Voices in Postcolonial Studies. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. Book Review: Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire by Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel (2020), March 1st 2021, LSE Review of Books. (Open access)
• Hiraide, L.A. Book Review: Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man by Joshua Bennett (2020), January 8th 2021, LSE Review of Books. (Open access)

Alistair Bernal Holmes is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology at Goldsmiths. His research focuses on the politics of futurity in the contemporary era, with a particular interest in potential and emergent ‘exits’ from a crisis-stricken capitalist present.

Before joining Goldsmiths, he completed a BA in International Relations and Politics from the University of Sheffield and an MA in European Culture & Thought from UCL, as well as worked as an educator in France, Spain and China for over eight years. 

Supervisors

• Svenja Bromberg
• Alberto Toscano 

Brenda is a part-time PhD Sociology student and a counsellor working with children who have experienced domestic abuse. She has a special interest in researching with children using multimodal ethnography. 

Her research project is a multimodal ethnographic study with children who have experienced domestic abuse and social care interventions. This thesis explores the everyday lives of children. There is significant literature about domestic abuse and children, but very few have been done with children themselves (Callaghan, Fellin and Alexander, 2017). Even when research has been done with children there is little exploration of their lives beyond the remit of domestic abuse.

Using multimodal ethnography, the thesis attends to the everyday lives of children who have experienced domestic abuse and social care interventions. The research foregrounds children’s knowledge and experience of their lives, and it uses a multimodal method to enable children to express themselves. The research shows how, in paying close attention to the mundane practice and materiality of everyday life, we can experience how children make sense of their lives and experiences, resulting in children creating knowledge about themselves that is beyond the constraints of domestic abuse and adversity. 

Supervisor

• Sevasti-Melissa Nolas

Dinesh Poudyal is a current PhD researcher in Sociology. Mr. Poudyal is a Gold Medalist, being awarded the Gold Medal by the then king of Nepal for acquiring the first position in his MA in Sociology from Tribhuvan University, Nepal.

Along with his good experiences in teaching Sociology at a higher level, he also has experience in social research. As an author, Mr Poudyal has published a book called: Sociology of Economic Development. His active involvement in Nepalese diasporic organisations in the UK has helped him to widen his opportunity to work as a student representative of PhD Sociology, and a student community leader in this university.

Following the global trends of recent migration, immigrants’ integration has been considered a major challenge for European nations. In light of its colonial past, the United Kingdom has practised different integration strategies to accommodate its diversified immigrants, especially its commonwealth dominions.

In the context of Nepal, due to the Nepalese soldiers’ (known as Gurkhas) distinct and diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom, the subject of Nepalese migration and integration has been considered a significant area of study. Therefore, Mr. Dinesh Poudyal’s research aims to explore Nepalese migrants’ immigration and integration status in relation to the immigration and integration policies adopted by the UK. 

Supervisors

• Sara Farris
• Les Back 

George Kalivis (he/they) is a PhD candidate in Visual Sociology and Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a background in Gender Studies (Goldsmiths) and Architecture (University of Thessaly). Their doctoral research looks at the homemaking tactics of the Greek queer diaspora in London, with a focus on how alternative modes of pedagogy, care, and kinship are being shared inventively among its members.

The project elaborates conceptually and methodologically on a practice-based ethnographic exploration of “how-to” guidance manuals as performative devices for doing the self and its affinities, arguing for the bodily counter-normative potentials that such devices may take within the queer-diasporic community. 

 
George has collaborated with scholars, artists, institutions and collectives on cultural and academic projects in Greece and the UK as a researcher, designer, director, curator, artist, educator, author and editor. Among further projects, he is Podcast and Visual Coordinator at The Sociological Review, Research Assistant at Politics of Patents, and Podcast Researcher, Artist and Presenter for Who Do We Think We Are? 

Supervisors

• Kat Jungnickel
• Nirmal Puwar 
• Nina Wakeford (former)

Links

• Instagram: @geo_kalivis 
• ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8048-8437 
• Further channel: goldsmiths.academia.edu/GeorgeKalivis 

Jordan is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. She obtained her MA in Human Rights, Culture, and Social Justice from Goldsmiths, University of London. She founded Souljourn Yoga Foundation, a US 501(c)3 non-profit that raises awareness and funds for young women’s education and empowerment by using yoga as a platform for social activism. Jordan has been featured in Forbes, Yoga Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Evening Standard, and Marie Claire UK. Jordan is an activist, writer, yoga teacher, and TEDx speaker. 

Originating from India, yoga is a 4,000-year-old practice, which has become a global phenomenon. Even the United Nations chose to deem June 21st as International Yoga Day thus “recognizing that yoga provides a holistic approach to health and well-being” (UN, 2014). But can the benefits of yoga be accessible and adaptable for populations who have never been exposed to a ‘downward facing dog’?

This project explores how learning yoga and other holistic practices, including elements of self-care, such as meditation and creative expression through movement, can positively impact female, and adolescent Berber students in the High Atlas Mountains of rural Morocco. The study looks at how yoga can be a bridge between the internal and external world by offering a variety of practices and tools that help to bridge the two worlds together through embodiment.  

Jordan’s project explores what it means to think with, and through, the body as the vehicle for all other forms of empowerment. How to understand the term ‘embodiment’ is central, and the women in the program guide the project here. Trainees will learn about physical yoga practices and how those can be used, be it for self-practice or teaching a group. Jordan is leading yoga classes virtually through Zoom so that the students become familiar with the yoga practice before the intensive training sessions that she will teach in person in Morocco.

The project’s methodology employs qualitative research methods to assess the journey of each young woman involved in the On the Ground Training. Jordan will follow the same group of baccalaureate students for two years as they study yoga, prior to their graduation from EFA. Interviews are the main method for collecting research data, but the project also uses observation, and written reflections – Jordan’s own, the students’ and the housemothers.

Supervisor

• Vikki Bell

Links

• Instagram: @jforjordanashley
• Instagram: @souljournyoga 

Silvia has a BA in Filmmaking and Creative Media from the University of the West of England, and a MRes in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths. Between the two, she worked as a film curator for MUBI and as a freelance journalist for various international publications and websites – most regularly, she run a ‘Coming of Age’ column for Shanghai-based magazine Modern Weekly China, on how the trends followed by young people around the world come to reflect broader cultural and political shifts.

As a film curator, Silvia still organises occasional screenings in London’s theatres and galleries.As well as a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, she is now an Associate Lecturer, Silvia teaches or has taught in the Fashion and Design Product departments at the RCA, Contextual and Theoretical Studies at LCC, and Fashion Journalism at LCF.

Silvia’s PhD focuses on shoplifting as a feminist practice, and is part of the ERC-funded ‘Politics of Patents (POP): Re-imagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820-2020’ research project. It examines the clothes that female shoplifters wore or might have worn at the turn of the 20th century, as sartorial technologies that enabled, facilitated, or encouraged theft as an act of resistance.

Silvia’s research is conducted across archives, by drawing textual and visual connections between selected inventions from the POP database, patented in the late 19th and early 20th century, and contemporary newspapers’ description of shoplifters’ clothes. Because history forgets women’s shoplifting when it’s successful, her research is also necessarily speculative: drawing from the transcripts of those that failed, she seeks to reimagine successful thefts. 

Supervisors

• Kat Jungnickel
• Nirmal Puwar 
• Rebecca Coleman (former)

Links

• Instagram: @silviabombardini

Stephanie Guirand (She, her, hers) is a Haiti-born member of the Haitian-American cis-woman. Stephanie holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut, a master's degree from the University of London, SOAS, and is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the Sociology Department. Stephanie Guirand is a gender specialist who identifies as a Black feminist.

Her thesis focuses on housing policy and housing transience among African-descended men who ‘live’ between multiple households. Stephanie is the treasurer of Goldsmiths Racialised Postgraduate Network (GRPN), the secretary of the Board of Directors at AMINGA: Youth Sports Development Program, and is a senior researcher for The Black Response Cambridge and the current Board President of Cambridge Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team (HEART).  

Absent effective policies and programs, where do Black men live? This case study examines formal (public housing, section 8 vouchers, inclusionary housing) and informal ways (social networks) that low-income African-descended men meet their housing needs in Cambridge, MA, USA.  The data collection methods are service-based episodic ethnography with participant observation and participatory action research (PAR).

The overarching argument is that housing insecurity and transience are politically protracted phenomena. Stephanie's project makes three claims: 1) The housing insecurity experienced by low-income African-descended men needs to be empirically examined. Collapsing them with others ignores the specific experiences at their intersection (i.e. gender, race, and class). 2) A complex web of policies, programs, and eligibility criteria result in de facto exclusion of African-descended men. And 3) to address their basic housing needs, these men rely on their social networks, predominantly composed of women, who bear an inordinate burden as a result. 

Supervisor

• Brian Alleyne 

Sunwoo Kim is a PhD student in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Prior to joining the PhD programme, he studied BA in Cultural Contents at Inha University in South Korea and the first MA in Aesthetics & Art Theory at CRMEP (The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy) and the second MA in Sociology at Goldsmiths university. He is currently studying STS theories and sensory ethnography under the guidance of Alex and Michael. 

His current research interests are the interrelationship between physical and digital space, and its implications on residents’ sociality in everyday life. It scrutinises the various interactions between human and non-human agencies in the two cities, London and Seoul.

The research investigates the organisation of space, the constitution of neighbourhoods, the use of digital technology, the balance of human life with nature and encounters, and forces like interests, preferences, or institutions that propel essences into action, in the cities. It is expected to shed light on not only the problem of housing insecurity, scarcity and solitude for the young and aged generation but also critically question the current re-urbanisation and the regeneration of the cities in the neo-liberalised world. 

Supervisors

• Alex Rhys-Taylor
• Michael Guggenheim 
• Brian Alleyne (former)

Links

• Instagram: @moonandlight21

Thomas Wadsworth is a PhD student in Visual Sociology and Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Their research focuses on self-harm and online spaces, with particular attention to the circulation of imageries, and different ways mental healthcare is co-constituted within affected communities beyond medical and clinical settings. They are also interested in the topics of participatory methods and what to do when they fail, and social and aesthetic ‘deviance’. 

Supervisors

• Sevasti-Melissa Nolas
• Rebecca Coleman
• Yasmin Gunaratnam (former)

Links

• Twitter: @TomWadsworth_ 

Oliver is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology of Goldsmiths College, studying transitions to community ownership. He helped to take Bath City FC into community ownership and previously served on the board of Supporters Direct (now part of the Football Supporters Association). He also works as Research Director of New Citizenship Project, a consultancy and think tank specialising in participatory culture and strategy.

Oliver has an MA in Critical and Creative Analysis from Goldsmiths College and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.   

Using an ANT-inspired ethnographic approach, Oliver’s research takes a closer look at the nuts and bolts of how groups come together and take the things that matter to them into community ownership. He explores such transitional processes as sites of contest and negotiation in which old assumptions are rendered mutable and new possibilities arise; different conceptions of the asset and its communities are mobilised, and various power asymmetries are reshuffled. 

Supervisors

• Michael Guggenheim
• Katherine Robinson 

Links

• Further channel: holtaway.wixsite.com/research 

Zoe Walshe is a PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Zoe’s doctoral research explores children's and families’ accounts of housing precarity in austerity Britain. The thesis traces the figure of the child through a series of case studies, developing a qualitative data patchwork from crowdsourced archives, local housing activism and participatory arts projects, alongside policy and legal texts. 

Zoe is co-convenor of the Childhood Publics Reading Group (2019-present), steering committee member of the Centre for Urban and Community Research and member of the research network, NYLON. She has previously worked as a research assistant for the Centre for Urban and Community Research (Goldsmiths) on the Fellowship Inn Evaluation Project and Interfaith Childhoods. 

Supervisors

• Emma Jackson

• Sevasti-Melissa Nolas 

• Michaela Benson (former) 

This project investigates the impact that including masses in trading activities through financial technology has on retail investors and digitized economies in general.

I am interested in understanding multiple facets of retail investing: speculative labour and its ideological enactment, communities in digitized financial capitalism and the impact their (technical and discursive) tools have on facilitation large-scale financial integration or post-capital-ist resistance.

How does the behaviour of retail investors help to understand speculative labour? What are the ideological figures emerging with this? How have FinTech and digitized financial communities shifted (affective) relations between key actors in financial capitalism? How does digitized speculative labour tie FinTech to emerging class structures and post-capitalist projects?

Through collaborative, multi-modal research, my co-creators and I will generate ethnographic insights into realities of value creation in digitized financial capitalism where capitalist and post-capitalist values sit alongside each other.

Supervisors

• Professor Rebecca Cassidy
• Massimiliano Mollona

To find out more about Anna Rohmann visit their LinkedIn profile.

Supervisors

• Dr Alice Elliot
• Dr Henrike Donner

To find out more about Daisy Swift, visit their LinkedIn profile.

My research examines the everyday day lives of people of African descent in Poland. It engages with the diaspora as a vehicle through which we can generate an alternative understanding of the political, economic and social changes in post-war Poland.

The diasporic networks in question were established during the Cold War, through state funded scholarships and remains in existence today, alongside a more recent migrant cohort from sub-Saharan Africa who have come to Poland for economic reasons.

While much has been written about African diasporas in the Trans-Atlantic and the Western European context (Ahmed, 2004; Campt, 2005; Gilroy, 2007, 2010; Stoler, 2011), there is scant scholarship on African diasporas elsewhere (Żeleza, 2005).

Working inter-generationally, this trauma-informed ethnographic account intends to shed light on the racialised experiences of Black people who make their home in Poland. With the use of oral histories, photo elicitation and archival work this research offers a new account of Poland’s historical transformation from communism to capitalism and the current rise of right-wing populism.

Supervisors

• Gabriel Dattatreyan
• Julia Sauma

To find out more about Jessica Lumanisha, visit their LinkedIn profile.

This project will explore contemporary and historical social, environmental, and climatological issues in the Brazilian Amazon, and examine the potential of indigenous cosmological thought and activism to transform colonial legal frameworks.

Recent cases filed by indigenous groups and environmental lawyers against the Bolsonaro administration in 2021 are a step towards this transformation. The project will analyze these cases, conduct court room ethnography in the International Criminal Court (ICC), and interview legal actors and indigenous leaders involved in the cases to gain insight into the role of international law in enacting justice for indigenous struggles.

The project will investigate claims that environmental and climatological destruction can be considered genocide against indigenous peoples, and assess whether the 1948 genocide convention allows for indigenous claims to be supported.

Supervisors

• Julia Sauma
• Dr Martyn Wemyss
• Dr Pauline Von-Hellermann

To find out more about Safa Daud, visit their LinkedIn profile.

My PhD research is located in an engagement with several different queer and trans* communities that are currently developing in predominantly rural areas in Spain and Portugal.

In 2018, two in five LGBTI respondents in the EU (38 %) experienced hate-motivated violence and harassment, with transgender (48 %) and intersex (42 %) people indicating the highest rates of harassment, and most participants of minority backgrounds saying that race, ethnicity, religion, and disability created additional grounds for discrimination (FRA, 2019).

In the context of crisis, marked by violence and social inequalities affecting queer and trans people, amidst the climate crisis, there is an urgent need for imagining, creating, and documenting alternative ways of living. This research focuses on queer and trans* eco-communities that are gathering and living in rural spaces and their collective practices of ‘queer worlding’.

Worlding is “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come'' (Haraway, 2016, p. 31).

Elaborating on this concept, I focus on queer worlding, which centers around the co-creation of queer worlds and possible futures through the cultivation of shared practices, imaginaries, and desires. Therefore, with a focus on co-creative queer worlding practices, ranging from collective social, spiritual, ecological, and artistic practices, my research seeks to explore the development and experience of queer and trans* communities in rural settings.

Moving beyond essentialist notions of queerness as solely being formulated around a politics of shared identity or as being inherently located in urban contexts, this project, instead focuses on specific shared practices, imaginaries, and desires that are being activated to generate safer, and more sustainable communities, spaces, lives, and futures for LGBTQIA+ people and beyond.

For this project, I will use a range of collaborative, embodied and visual qualitative ethnographic research methods including queer worlding as experimental method, while drawing upon my own experiences as a queer and non-binary person working with alternative LGBTQIA+ communities to explore queer worlding as a radical tool for imagining and co-creating experimental modes of living in response to urgent social and environmental issues.

Supervisors

• Dr EJ Gonzalez-Polledo
• Isaac Marrero-Guillamón

To find out more about Rae Teitelbaum, visit their LinkedIn profile.

My research is situated in the fields of political anthropology and memory studies. It investigates the social life of neutrality, which is a powerful force in Swiss society, despite controversies which regularly challenge the dominant narrative.

Taking an ethnographic approach, I will analyse the established frameworks of memory to understand how multifaceted history is constructed, maintained and questioned, and to what extent it is possible to simultaneously know and yet not know (Bijl 2015).

Furthermore, by looking at the everyday life of neutrality, my project also seeks to understand how a key symbol is consumed, articulated, talked about, felt, embodied and enacted by the people who make up the nation.

Supervisors

• Professor Cris Shore
• Dr Martin Webb

Through the lens of creativity and development, my research explores Indonesian Traditional Textiles and the communities they exist in. It will explore the journey of textiles and their engagement from creators to owners.

Thinking about the anthropological critiques of development, this research aims to examine how the concept engages with creativity and the creative industries in Indonesia, focusing on the fashion and textile sector.

Following a line of enquiry on understanding the different perspectives and experiences of creativity and development, it aims to illuminate questions on the real impact of imposing these concepts across different contexts.

I will explore how these terms exist as malleable concepts of critical thinking, capacity building and economic opportunity and how they have manifested and been used as tools for social innovation within a community of weavers.

My research will also delve into how these tools have been imposed in Indonesia and started a movement of entrepreneurship within the creative economy ecosystem.

Supervisors

• Dr Henrike Donner
• Dr Martin Webb

To find out more about Sarah Ramadhita, visit their LinkedIn profile.

Rambisayi Marufu (she/her) was born and raised in Zimbabwe and currently lives in London. She is a massage, reflexology and reiki practitioner, and curator of circles, ceremonies and installations.

Her practice locates African Diasporic spaces of hair care as intimate sites of Black feminist world-making and re-orientation. Rambisayi's practice is multi-modal, and brings together touch, sound, analogue image, and imagination to curate embodied experiences centering care.

Rambisayi has collaborated across community, university and museum spaces. She is a sister, friend 'other mother' and Auntie.

Supervisors

• Dr Gabriel Dattatreyan
• Professor Emma Tarlo
• Dr Adom Philogene Heron
• Dr Alice Elliot

To find out more about Rambisayi Marufu, visit her website.

Alice is practice-based, AHRC (CHASE) funded PhD candidate in Visual Anthropology. Her research engages with the materials used in analogue photography, with a focus on silver.

She traces silver from its extraction to processing into photographic paper. Thinking with decolonial theory, Alice explores the histories of photographic silver, and the ecologies and lives that are touched by it.

Alice is also photographic artist and co-director of the Sustainable Darkroom - an international research community that develops lower-toxicity praxis in analogue photography.

Her photographic work is exhibiting at Ekenas Contemporary Art Museum, Finland (16.4 - 3.9.2023), and she is pleased to be part of the TRACTS Fellowship, Leiden University, Netherlands.

Supervisors

• Dr Chris Wright
• Lee Douglas

This project explores the radical potential of the Feminist Library (FL) as an activist archive, where the archive’s multi-vocal, fluid, and often fragmented nature challenges conventional archival practices. Grounded in feminist and decolonial epistemologies, the study examines how refusal, embodied knowledge, and collaborative practices shape the archive’s content and its role in collective knowledge practices.

The research engages with key themes in archival theory, including critiques of institutional archives, community archiving, and feminist and Black feminist interventions that foregrounds embodied, affective and speculative approaches. These perspectives highlight the role of activist archives in resisting linear narratives and historical claims to neutrality.

The methodology combines ethnographic and archival research methods. As a participant observer embedded in the FL community, my method rejects traditional notions of objectivity, instead embracing a collaborative and reflexive approach. Archival research will focus on periodicals from the 1970s-1980s, particularly Black feminist newsletters, alongside other ephemera from the FL’s collection.

This research will incorporate ‘instinctual wayfinding’ as a technique for navigating the fragmentary archive. Collaborative workshops with the FL community will further explore how these materials are interpreted, produced, and reimagined through collective creativity. An emergent anti-methodology fosters an approach that remains responsive to the complexities and contradictions within the archive. Ultimately, the project offers a way of thinking with archives that leaves room for messy, unruly and wayward possibilities.

Supervisors

• Emma Abotsi
• Alice Elliot