THE RIGHT TO THE SURFACE IS THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
I have recently been appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cities and Urbanism at Melbourne Uni. The position is affiliated with the School of Culture of Communication, Faculty of Arts, and I sit within the wonderful Centre for Cities. Melbourne is my new home now and I hope to produce exciting research from here …
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Images like this are like a pluri-vocal whisper reminding me of the energy of urban togetherness, in all its messy, smelly, disorderly forms. One of my Leake Street photographs has been featured on the cover of the Visual Studies journal (Vol 36, Issue 1, 2021). You can see the cover on their website and read …
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Oh so delighted to have been nominated in the Inspiring Teaching Delivery category of this year's Education Awards at UCL. This nomination is particularly meaningful because it has been put forward by students of the Bartlett School of Architecture (it's the Student Choice Award) and because it comes in this online teaching year. Shout-outs to …
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One of the main losses resulting from covid lockdowns and curfews has been that of rights to disorder, mischief, debauchery, and any number of afterhours activities which take place among people. To respond to the thresholds theme of the new Borderland journal, I propose to inhabit the time-space of curfews and lockdowns, and confront their moral authority through …
Continue reading "Out late and dirty: curfews and the covid city"
“Power, Paint and Public Walls” was my six-day endeavour with Sprya Sharma and 25 students from CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India. Taught online under an intensive "winter school" format, the course aimed to develop a multidisciplinary reading of contemporary cities by examining walls, surfaces, graffiti, street art, advertising and other types of wall writing. The …
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I was excited and pleased to speak to Eric Mollo of ABC News Radio about the social value of street art, as part of the programme "Celebrating the arts". Eric prepared a short segment on "Street art as a symbol of unity", reflecting on the many murals and other forms of memorialisation on public walls …
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I will be teaching a week-long winter course at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India (well, online) with my colleague Sprya Sharma. Sprya is an architect who has been researching wall drawings in her region (particularly the fascinating Madhubani paintings), and the two of us work with similar wall-reading tools, which we are going to bring …
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I wrote a short article for U+I Think, about how to imagine a heritage culture of movement and change, by learning from graffiti. "Having written a PhD on graffiti – my friends call me Dr Wall – one of my most important takeaways is this: colour and beauty are not intrinsically valuable for cities. Yet …
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My Leake Street repeat photography research project has won the International Visual Sociology Association's Prosser Award for outstanding work in visual methodologies. The Prosser award is offered annually to emerging scholars from the social sciences, arts, humanities (and architecture!) and supports the development of qualitative visual research methods. I am very pleased that this project …
