Current PhD students

In the Urban Factory: The Reconfiguration of Labour and Urban Space in Berlin

My thesis departs from the claim that urban space has been as fundamentally transformed by de-industrialisation and neoliberalisation, as has the nature of work. Combining fieldwork with philosophical and geographical analysis, I research the reconfiguration of both labour relations and urban space in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Under modernist urbanism the city was planned around the centrality of industrial production and work located in factories, while the home was assumed to be the domestic sphere of non-work. My research puts forward the notion of the urban factory to argue that post-Fordist capitalism is characterised by the decreasing importance of factory-based production and by the multiplication of forms and sites of labour. The case studies – labour processes in corporate co-working spaces and hosting on Airbnb – shed light not only on the new composition of both labour and the city but also the lived experience of social reproduction under conditions of precarity.

Rabea is supervised by Dr. Marina Vishmidt and Dr. Louis Moreno.

She obtained a BA in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin (as well as Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Sciences Po Paris) and holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College. Her PhD-research is currently funded by the “Studienstiftung des

Deutschen Volkes”. In 2018/19 she taught a seminar on feminism and biopolitics at Freie Universität Berlin (research unit for political theory and philosophy).

http://neofung.tumblr.com/infernozine

My thesis will examine the emergence of new media practice that works at the borders of both art and science. The transitory field of bio art has many definitions and encompasses different practices ranging from the application of computer technology to the manipulation of genetic code and cell structures.

The common root, however, is their interaction with new biosciences, particularly biotechnology and the developments that take life or living matter and manipulate it through technical intervention. The intention of this research is to question the role both art and science practice play in constructing political and philosophical concepts that become identified as 'life'. Vehemently opposed to positioning art, science or the humanities hierarchically in terms of 'value' I am interested in understanding how knowledge is mediated, how it gains cultural, social and political value in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the stories we tell about ourselves, about ‘the Other’ and about the 'world'.

Ben holds a Bachelors degree in Contemporary Media Practice from the University of Westminster where he specialised in Software Design as Art Practice and a Masters Degree in Digital Media from Goldsmiths College.

In my dissertation I investigate the affective connection between people and mobile phones, a connection I articulate as kinship, romance and other more ambiguous attachments. This connection implicates bodies – both animate and inanimate ones. As I argue, these bodies are not bounded, isolated ‘things’ but are rather part of ongoing processes of communication and information exchange. 

Drawing on my experiences as a career journalist I employ writing – as both my method of investigation and an embodied practice. Therefore, my writing is not only a way to list and describe experiences and feelings but also to perform them. 

I argue that part of my strategic role and critical reflexivity as a writer is to recognize the history of our human-mobile relationship. This affective narrative is, therefore, a fashioned response - a re-storying - of the already taken-for-granted stories told about the technology. In so doing, I  avoid reducing mobiles to objects for analytical study somehow exempt from the context, culture and history that produced them.    

Supervised by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska

Please find more information on my website: nataliedixon.info

In recent years, media studies has developed theoretical models which consider the material aspects of media technologies. In the context of the widespread ecological crisis, such studies have included analyses of media as products of the extraction of geological materials. My doctoral project of ‘geological filmmaking’ contributes to this growing set of discourses by experimenting, on a conceptual and artistic level, with the reciprocal relations between geology and film. Building on existing theoretical studies of the geological materiality of the filmic medium, it explores formal and temporal intersections between film and geology in order to engage with some of the representational challenges posed by the ecological crisis. ‘The geological’ here acts as a perceptual and cognitive extremity of the human (in)ability to grasp processes unfolding across vast spatio-temporal scales. Through an integrated theory-practice methodology my project takes two specific geological phenomena as prisms through which to explore the greater philosophical problems encountered at the intersections of human and geological timescales. In the process of making two films – one focused on sinkholes, the other on asbestos – the geological has revealed itself to be inextricably tied to socio-economic processes. It has thus become an urgent demand, requiring a response here and now. This study is an attempt to offer such a response. By reading film and geology through each other, I have staged an encounter between the moments in which their reciprocity illuminates key issues surrounding the anthropogenic ecological crisis, both in its vastness and proximity, its longevity and immediacy. I have also taken some steps towards outlining an artistic methodology for engaging with planetary ecological issues via the medium of film.

Sasha Litvintseva is supervised by Joanna Zylinska and Rachel Moore.

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker and writer.

Sasha Litvintseva's website

This thesis explores borders between mediated and unmediated nightscapes, and performs analysis of ecologies of perception and cognition, calling into question a simple distinction between darkness as “unmediated” and light as “mediated” space. The aim is to gain new ways of reading the city night image and to tackle influences between built and “natural” environments within visual investigations.

https://www.nightdrawing.com
https://www.chantalmeng.com

Select journal publications

• ‘I love you more: an embodied account of performing ziyarat in Iraq’, Performing Islam, forthcoming 2014.
• ‘Gender, inclusivity and UK mosque experiences ,’ Contemporary Islam 8 (1) 2014, 1-16.
• 'Heather has two mommies and they're both caucasian and moneyed: Unsaids in international queer children's literature,'Darkmatter Journal, September 2010.
• 'Some Queer Questions from a Muslim faith perspective,' Journal of Sexualities, 2010, 13 (6) 671-684.
• 'Rap on 'l' Avenue'; reflections on Islam, Masculinities, and the public sphere in the Tunisian Rap scene,' (Co-authored with Qurra-Tul-Anne Hussain), Journal of Contemporary Islam, 2010, 5 (1) 37-58
• ‘Sexual ethics, marriage, and sexual autonomy,' Journal of Contemporary Islam, 2009, 3 (1) 59-78.

Select book chapters

• ‘Rap on l’avenue,’ (with Hussain, Q), in The Hip Hop and Religion Reader, eds. Pinn, A., and Miller, M., Routledge: New York., forthcoming 2014. 
• ‘Gender, sexuality and inclusivity in UK mosques’ in Marranci, G., Islam in practice, Routledge Studying Religions in Practice series, Routledge: London, 2014, 124-134. 
• ‘Textual Queering and filmatic interventions: Contesting Islam as heteronormative inheritance,' The Ashgate Research Companion to Sexuality and Religion, (Edited by Andrew Yip), 2012. 

Website: http://stuarthallfoundation.org/priya-sharma/
Twitter: @pshar1312