My research
I have trained and participated in a range of community research and non-profit consultation, monitoring and evaluation projects over my 10 year career.
Currently, I am an interdisciplinary PhD research student, studying with Goldsmiths, University of London. My research is practice-led, exploring the happenings of multispecies (or more-than-human) community building through embodied community practices with urban wild spaces in and around Southampton, UK.
The following is an abstract of my working thesis.
Littered bodies of the urban wilds:
Dis/belonging and an embodied praxis of becoming-with
Accelerated urbanisation and anthropocentric infrastructures are rapidly diminishing opportunities for interspecies encounters, necessitating urgent reconfiguration of opportunities for, and practices of, more-than-human relationalities. This project embraces a new materialist, practice-based approach to explore the potential for ethical community- and placemaking- practices amidst the pervasive harms of the Capitalocene. Specifically, it explores the emergent relations amongst bodies traditionally categorised as 'undesirable', ‘out of place’ or ‘troublesome’: how they appear, their affective doings, and how these can function as generative pedagogies tools in a praxis of becoming-with.
Utilising embodied methods, this research-practice emerges in tandem with(in) a situated ‘urban wild’ setting, based in Southampton, UK. Through the lens of the posthumanist imperative to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), this project it seeks to inspire curiosity about the relational dynamics of littered bodies through an inquiry into its potentia within a generative embodied praxis of becoming-with. Through this practice-research, contributions aim to be offered regarding alternative ethico-onto-epistemologies that prioritise response-able practices of care and belonging with(in) interspecies urban settings.