Introducing New PhD Students 2016/17

 

 

Adam Badger

Space, Freedom and Control in the Digital Workplace

Having undertaken both BA Geography and MA Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway, I am delighted to return to the department for PhD study. This time, however, with a twist! As a Leverhulme Trust Magna Carta Scholarship funded candidate I have been given the opportunity to work in a wholly interdisciplinary capacity between the schools of Geography and Management. With my supervisory team – Prof. Phil Crang (Geog) and Prof. Gillian Symons (SoM) – I will be investigating the contemporary digital workplace through a range of analytical lenses. Of particular interest currently are the themes of ‘surveillance, display, and (de)territorialisation’, in addition to the development of methodological toolkits geared toward today’s changing work environments. In this race – both with and against Moore’s law – this line of study will hopefully generate exciting research into digital workplaces and, in addition, build bridges between the disciplines of Geography and Management.

 

Ed Brookes 

Excavating the contemporary urban geographies of Robin Hood Gardens, London

Before joining the Royal Holloway family I studied at the University of Southampton, graduating in 2013 with a BA in human geography. With a brief interlude for various jobs and travel excursions it wasn’t until 2015 when I returned to academia, enrolling in the MA Cultural Geography course at Royal Holloway. It was during this time, and with great help from the Geography Department, that I managed to secure a PhD with funding by the ESRC. With a start date of September 2017, the PhD (supervised by Dr. Oli Mould and Prof. David Gilbert) aims to explore the social and cultural urban geographies of the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in East London. More specifically it will focus on how the present-day site, and its on-going political contestation, is continually ‘produced’ by historical and layered assemblages of materiality, culture and urban politics.

In terms of my wider research foci I am particularly interested in the geographies of home, geographies of architecture and concepts of liminality. With a particular fascination with how individuals create and navigate the spaces in which they live as well as how intimate and ‘everyday’ architectural spaces are linked to a wider urban politics. Looking beyond my academic interests, I fill my time with manufacturing unhealthy baked goods and consuming large amounts of dystopian science fiction.

 

Daniel Crawford

 

(Dis)Assembling the Sacred

 

I’ve been a student in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway since 2012, completing a BA in Geography and MA in Cultural Geography during that time. Funded by an ESRC 1+3 studentship, my PhD aims to investigate how meanings and experiences of sacred spaces are influenced by processes of material change. Within the ‘infrasecular’ present such processes are pervasive, as the relationships between communities and individuals, belief, non-belief and alternative forms of spirituality become increasingly complex, and, in parallel, sacred spaces are transformed and repurposed, made and unmade, neglected and conserved. I am interested in exploring these shifts with reference to various religious and non-religious understandings of the ‘sacred’ itself, many of which offer compelling and provocative ways of thinking about its geographies (architectural, natural, bodily, textual). These inform my current theoretical work looking at how and where silence, nonsense (and non-sense), emptiness and other negative projections of the unknowable might exert themselves. Finding suitable case studies and methodologies to clarify and focus these concerns will be my next step.

 

Katy Lawn 

Affective geographies of the contemporary British workplace: lifeworlds, biopolitics and precarity

I completed my undergraduate degree at Durham University, where I focused on cultural and literary geographies through a comparative study of Jack Kerouac novels and the philosophy of the (then) recently translated You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk. After completing my undergraduate degree in 2013, I worked in a large publishing house for a year – which meant I got to meet David Starkey (very briefly). But the call of the academy was still too strong… and I returned to complete my MA at Royal Holloway in 2016 with a sustained interest in philosophies of living and emotional geographies. My PhD  work – supervised by Prof. Phil Crang and Dr. Oli Mould – will carry this interest through with a particular focus on the geographies of work, and within that, the role of affect and emotion in the workplace. I also have an interest in creative methods in social research – for example poetic ethnography and visual methods. When I am not reading critical management theory, I also like to paint, draw, and go to spoken word poetry events.

 

Flora Parrott

Swallow hole: the pursuit of darkness and uncertainty

 

I studied Fine Art at The Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, The Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art graduating with a Masters in Printmaking in 2009. Exhibitions include, Robin Gibson Gallery in Sydney, Herbert Gallery and Museum in Coventry and the Ryedale Folk Museum, The Cosmos, Residency & Relatively Absolute at Wysing Arts Centre, The Negligent Eye at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, and Thin Place, Oriel Myrddin, Wales. In 2012 I received an Artist International Development Grant to travel to Brazil, the resulting project ‘Fixed Position’ showed at Tintype London, Projeto Fidalga, São Paulo and in The Earth Science Museum at The University São Paulo.

My teaching experience includes: Lecturer at Norwich University College of the Arts and Senior Lecturer at Kingston University. I am also currently visiting lecturer at UCA, and the universities of Birmingham, Bath and Bournemouth.

In 2016 I was Artist in Residence at RGS-IBG and The Leverhulme Artist in Residence in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University London, developing a project titled ‘Swallet’. Current projects include a publication with Camberwell Press and an upcoming group show at Norwich Castle Museum.
 

Huw Rowlands

Historical and contemporary performance of cross-cultural first contact encounters: temporal and spatial dynamics

As first year AHRC-funded PhD student, I focus on re-performances of first-contact encounters in colonial-indigenous relationships. My research explores the roles of these encounters and their subsequent expressions in a range of media and contexts, such as neo-historical novels, dance/theatre, oral traditions, and exhibitions, including in the contemporary world. Seen through the lenses of performance and performativity, the research aims to understand the role of first contact re-performances in the cross-cultural dynamics of contemporary societies. I am supervised by Felix Driver and advised by Helen Gilbert.

A ‘Surgeon’ since undertaking an MA in the department 2014-15, I particularly enjoy the interdisciplinary nature of surgeries. Interdisciplinary, eclectic, curious, these are all words that seem to characterise my life; so far anyway. As a public/third sector project manager for 20 years, I worked on such diverse projects as the creation of a long-distance footpath between Winchester and Mont Saint Michel, funding Gaelic language tourism in Scotland, looking for life on Mars, and organising a multicultural percussion festival in the mountains of France. I taught geography, junk percussion and creative writing in both France and in UK Steiner schools over four years, and am also currently working (very) part-time as project co-manager, modern maps processing at the British Library.

My other interests include samba-reggae, photography, knitting, garden design, drawing, theatre, world music, walking and badminton.

 

Joy Slappnig

The Indigenous Map

My PhD project (which is part of the Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) scheme and supervised by Prof. Felix Driver and Dr. Catherine Souch) seeks to establish Indigenous contribution to the map collection at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and to explore the historical significance of “Indigenous maps” as sources of geographical information, as ethnographic objects, and as artefacts of encounter. I’m new to Geography and intrigued by the diversity of the discipline, and to see what my academic background can bring to my PhD. I completed a BA in History at King’s College London (my dissertation focused on the influence of bebop on racial integration in New York during the 1940s and ‘50s), and an MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford (where my final project investigated how the “remnants” of repatriated objects in American museums (catalogue records, exhibition labels, photographs, etc.), influence Indigenous presence in those institutions). I’m interested in the geographies of exchange and encounter, material anthropology, post-colonial studies, as well as ethnographic collections, and the ways in which they have been assembled (and sometimes disassembled), displayed and otherwise engaged with, and used in the production of knowledge. I really liked participating in curatorial research internships at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which I worked on a repatriation procedure with the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and on an exhibition of pre-Columbian architectural models. A you might expect, I enjoy visiting the London museums in my free time (the Hunterian Museum is a recent favourite), and I also like going to the movies. I’ve just moved to the northwest of London and I’m currently enjoying the novel NW by Zadie Smith. 

 

 

Hugh Crossfield (Ph.D. candidate) talks about the cultural geographies of consumer boycotts over on his blog.

Chomping at the Bloodied Bit

Over the last two years I have been researching the work of the radical anti-apartheid and anti-racist organization, Boycot Outspan Actie (Boycott Outspan Action). Founded in 1972 in Leiden, Holland, the BOA were led by the charismatic South African exile, Esau du Plessis.  After first contacting du Plessis in 2010, I have interviewed many key BOA activists and associates in Sweden and Holland; during this time I have been fortunate enough to have access to a range of compelling sources stored in private archives and correspondence. Much of this research will be published in my thesis in 2013. Here, as a little taster, I would like to provide you with a visual introduction to the organization that reworked the blood-sugar topos into a powerful anti-apartheid weapon.

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The Shaky City

Restrictions in Christchurch CBD Red Zone

“On February 22^nd, I found myself hugging the carpet in the staff common room of the department” (Julie Cupples 2012, 337)

I can completely relate to this. A few weeks ago, I too experienced an earthquake from inside The University of Canterbury Geography Department. I was sitting in the seminar room on the fourth floor, preparing to present my PhD project in a seminar series, when – without warning – an earthquake rattled the building. I gripped the chair I was sitting in tightly, watching the building sway from side-to-side, and anxiously willing the shaking to stop. Honestly? I was scared. While Julie experienced an earthquake of much greater intensity, I can entirely relate to the sense of powerlessness she experienced in that moment. As her insightful paper suggests, disasters have the ability to alter one’s life in unimaginable ways: “The life that we have is gone, and is replaced by something quite different, and potentially quite disorientating” (Cupples 2012, 337). In one split second, the familiar becomes the unfamiliar.

My doctoral project is based on the 2011 Queensland floods and considers how emotion motivates post-disaster return decisions (more details can be read here). To offer a point of comparison, I recently completed a 16-day fieldwork trip to Christchurch to explore the aftermath of the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes. I set off towards the Shaky City with a number of questions in mind: Does emotion differ in different disaster contexts? How does the ongoing nature of the earthquakes/aftershocks affect the decision to rebuild/relocate? As a researcher, I was also apprehensive about visiting a setting that I knew would be very emotionally raw, particularly after the emotional intensity of my research in Brisbane.

In Christchurch, I stayed at a hostel on Barbadoes street (with a group of British construction workers who, unsurprisingly, had all found work in the CBD). Although most of the CBD is still inaccessible to the general public, the morning after I arrived, I walked down recently re-opened Gloucester Street. As I navigated my way between  ‘No Access’ signs, shattered buildings and metal barriers, I was astounded at what I saw: a city so different to the place I visited four years ago. Christchurch has long been hailed the ‘most English’ of New Zealand’s cities. During my previous visit, I enjoyed the quaint streets, punting on the willow-lined River Avon, trams, and a farmers market in Cathedral Square. Post-quake Christchurch now appears horrifically broken; cracked and torn apart, absent of life, and the vibrancy I saw four years ago.

Destruction in Christchurch CBD

In the two weeks that followed, I spent my time observing the city. I visited Redcliffs, Sumner, Avonside and Lyttelton (towns notably affected by the February quake). Each town presented levels of devastation that I wasn’t expecting; shells of houses and abandoned businesses, empty plots, and broken communities. I also conducted four interviews with residents who were forcibly displaced from their homes after the February earthquake. Similarly to those I carried out in Brisbane, interviews were emotionally powerful and astute, illuminating the complexity of a post-disaster return decision.

Abandoned empty plot in Lyttelton

Since Christchurch is the third post-disaster location I have encountered, a number of points struck me about this setting in particular. Firstly, Fear. As I mentioned earlier, Cantarbrians have been subjected to thousand’s of aftershocks since 2010. The ongoingness of these quakes has left residents tired, drained and anxious. It seems the stress of living in fear is a heavy influence on decisions to move away from Christchurch. During my short time in the city, I felt four earthquakes – each with enough intensity to make my heart flutter uncomfortably. The Monday after I arrived, I visited the Christchurch museum on the day that it re-opened to the public. At the end of an excellent earthquake exhibition was a counter, tracking the number of aftershocks recorded since the 2010 September earthquake. The day I visited, this number stood at 11,489.

Furthermore, I was struck with the number of conversations I had with people who no longer feel safe in their homes. In this post-disaster context, the once familiar and comfortable setting of ‘home’ – the place one goes to feel grounded – no longer feels safe. This loss of security is, in fact, closely associated with the second point to strike me from my time in Christchurch: Helplessness.

Unlike in Brisbane, Christchurch homes are zoned according to earthquake damage levels. Red zones are areas where there is area-wide damage and an engineering solution to remediate the land damage would be uncertain, disruptive, not timely, nor cost effective. Those living in these areas are given an offer by the Crown to buy their property. While residents can legally choose not to accept this offer, services in the area will not be restored and insurers may also cancel insurance coverage. Perhaps most importantly, however, CERA also has powers (under the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011) to require (essentially force) residents to sell their property for its market value at that time. For some, then, the decision of whether to return ‘home’, or relocate, is no longer their choice to make. This understanding has left me thinking about how access/denial to home is dictated by larger political realities. The loss of these intimate spaces has left people in Christchurch restricted of their freedom, hopelessly stumbling down a broken path, in search for a place to call ‘home’.

Stephanie Morrice (Ph.D. student at Royal Holloway)

Bibliography

Cupples, J. (2012) “Boundary crossings and new striations: when disaster hits a neoliberalising campus”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (3): 337–41.