My research has focused on the politics and aesthetics of documentary cinemas, specifically audio-visual art practices investigating zones of conflict, militarisation and land occupation and those in dialogue with feminist, liberation and other forms of movement building.
My queries into the politics and poetics of in/justice, evidence, witnessing have led my attention towards violations of human and species rights through destructions of land and ecological/cultural environments as well as to research into agricultural practices as modes of care, recuperation and resistance.
Questions of relationality and how to live together otherwise in a multi-species world guide all my research while my understanding of ongoing coloniality and structural racism and in particular the legacies of plantation politics and cultures are foundational to all endeavours.
My training in anthropology as critique to neo/colonialist forms of knowledge production as well as my extensive and continuing research in South Asia have shaped my approach to research and much of my conceptual and political inquiries. I am invested in participatory research and anti-colonial research ethics as well as in working collaboratively, in exploring new forms of writing and different modes of sharing research with diverse publics.
Following a permaculture certificate and permaculture teacher training I recently collaborated with the theatre artist Mojisola Adebayo on developing 'Agri/cultural Practices for Climate Justice: anti-racism, arts and ecologies – an experimental workshop guidebook'. The workshops on which the guidebook is based experiment with putting into dialogue Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, games and exercises and Permaculture and Agroecology ethics and principles, with the motivation to fundamentally root the struggle of climate justice in a critique of environmental racism, extractive capitalism and the histories and presents of the colonial plantation system.
My current research explores soil as archive as well as forest pedagogies with the latter investigating possible tensions between conservation practices and the livelihood of communities indigenous to forest land. Research into colonial enclosures and extractions and their aftermath as well as developing multi-sensual research practices and pedagogies from and through forest thinking form some of my central concerns.
I have led and co-led the Visual Cultures PhD Programme for seven years including running its weekly research seminars. I also convened and taught various MA Contemporary Art Theory modules and BA History of Art modules in the areas of film, documentary mode work, the political image, audio visual arts and conflict, planetary cinemas, anti-colonial arts and ecology and Visual Cultures as public practice.
I was ethics advisor in the Visual Cultures department, on the Forensic Architecture Board and the Goldsmiths College ethics committee and I was a member of the Critical Ecologies network as Goldsmiths. I am the primary supervisor for a number of CHASE funded PhD students in Visual Cultures and have successfully supervised PhD dissertations within the wider fields of political cinemas and critical ecologies, many of those practice based.
