Research students

This project is an ethnographic study of gendered perspectives of the pandemic in the east London borough of Redbridge. It will focus on the perspectives of local women of South Asian heritage living in and around Ilford.However, it will not exclude other genders or communities from its scope.

The perspectives of these women will offer a lens onto the ways in which communities navigated ‘living together’ through the pandemic in an ethnically diverse and socio-economically varied area.

This research aims to generate data around the ways in which everyday practices, interactions and imaginings create and sustain relations within home and community spaces in ‘ordinary’ and ‘critical’ times.

Supervisors

• Professor Sophie Day
• Dr Alice Elliot

To find out more about Paaras Abbas, visit their LinkTree.

Alice is practice-based, AHRC (CHASE) funded PhD candidate in Visual Anthropology. Her research engages with the materials used in analogue photography, with a focus on silver.

She traces silver from its extraction to processing into photographic paper. Thinking with decolonial theory, Alice explores the histories of photographic silver, and the ecologies and lives that are touched by it.

Alice is also photographic artist and co-director of the Sustainable Darkroom - an international research community that develops lower-toxicity praxis in analogue photography.

Her photographic work is exhibiting at Ekenas Contemporary Art Museum, Finland (16.4 - 3.9.2023), and she is pleased to be part of the TRACTS Fellowship, Leiden University, Netherlands.

Supervisors

• Dr Chris Wright
• Dr Pauline Von Hellermann

This project will explore contemporary and historical social, environmental, and climatological issues in the Brazilian Amazon, and examine the potential of indigenous cosmological thought and activism to transform colonial legal frameworks.

Recent cases filed by indigenous groups and environmental lawyers against the Bolsonaro administration in 2021 are a step towards this transformation. The project will analyze these cases, conduct court room ethnography in the International Criminal Court (ICC), and interview legal actors and indigenous leaders involved in the cases to gain insight into the role of international law in enacting justice for indigenous struggles.

The project will investigate claims that environmental and climatological destruction can be considered genocide against indigenous peoples, and assess whether the 1948 genocide convention allows for indigenous claims to be supported.

Supervisors

• Julia Sauma
• Dr Martyn Wemyss
• Dr Pauline Von-Hellermann

To find out more about Safa Daud, visit their LinkedIn profile.

My research examines the everyday day lives of people of African descent in Poland. It engages with the diaspora as a vehicle through which we can generate an alternative understanding of the political, economic and social changes in post-war Poland.

The diasporic networks in question were established during the Cold War, through state funded scholarships and remains in existence today, alongside a more recent migrant cohort from sub-Saharan Africa who have come to Poland for economic reasons.

While much has been written about African diasporas in the Trans-Atlantic and the Western European context (Ahmed, 2004; Campt, 2005; Gilroy, 2007, 2010; Stoler, 2011), there is scant scholarship on African diasporas elsewhere (Żeleza, 2005).

Working inter-generationally, this trauma-informed ethnographic account intends to shed light on the racialised experiences of Black people who make their home in Poland. With the use of oral histories, photo elicitation and archival work this research offers a new account of Poland’s historical transformation from communism to capitalism and the current rise of right-wing populism.

Supervisors

• Dr Pauline Von Hellermann
• Julia Sauma

To find out more about Jessica Lumanisha, visit their LinkedIn profile.

Rambisayi Marufu (she/her) was born and raised in Zimbabwe and currently lives in London. She is a massage, reflexology and reiki practitioner, and curator of circles, ceremonies and installations.

Her practice locates African Diasporic spaces of hair care as intimate sites of Black feminist world-making and re-orientation. Rambisayi's practice is multi-modal, and brings together touch, sound, analogue image, and imagination to curate embodied experiences centering care.

Rambisayi has collaborated across community, university and museum spaces. She is a sister, friend 'other mother' and Auntie.

Supervisors

• Dr Gabriel Dattatreyan
• Professor Emma Tarlo
• Dr Adom Philogene Heron
• Dr Alice Elliot

To find out more about Rambisayi Marufu, visit her website.

Through the lens of creativity and development, my research explores Indonesian Traditional Textiles and the communities they exist in. It will explore the journey of textiles and their engagement from creators to owners.

Thinking about the anthropological critiques of development, this research aims to examine how the concept engages with creativity and the creative industries in Indonesia, focusing on the fashion and textile sector.

Following a line of enquiry on understanding the different perspectives and experiences of creativity and development, it aims to illuminate questions on the real impact of imposing these concepts across different contexts.

I will explore how these terms exist as malleable concepts of critical thinking, capacity building and economic opportunity and how they have manifested and been used as tools for social innovation within a community of weavers.

My research will also delve into how these tools have been imposed in Indonesia and started a movement of entrepreneurship within the creative economy ecosystem.

Supervisors

• Dr Henrike Donner
• Dr Martin Webb

To find out more about Sarah Ramadhita, visit their LinkedIn profile.

This project investigates the impact that including masses in trading activities through financial technology has on retail investors and digitized economies in general.

I am interested in understanding multiple facets of retail investing: speculative labour and its ideological enactment, communities in digitized financial capitalism and the impact their (technical and discursive) tools have on facilitation large-scale financial integration or post-capital-ist resistance.

How does the behaviour of retail investors help to understand speculative labour? What are the ideological figures emerging with this? How have FinTech and digitized financial communities shifted (affective) relations between key actors in financial capitalism? How does digitized speculative labour tie FinTech to emerging class structures and post-capitalist projects?

Through collaborative, multi-modal research, my co-creators and I will generate ethnographic insights into realities of value creation in digitized financial capitalism where capitalist and post-capitalist values sit alongside each other.

Supervisors

• Professor Rebecca Cassidy
• Massimiliano Mollona

To find out more about Anna Rohmann visit their LinkedIn profile.

My research is situated in the fields of political anthropology and memory studies. It investigates the social life of neutrality, which is a powerful force in Swiss society, despite controversies which regularly challenge the dominant narrative.

Taking an ethnographic approach, I will analyse the established frameworks of memory to understand how multifaceted history is constructed, maintained and questioned, and to what extent it is possible to simultaneously know and yet not know (Bijl 2015).

Furthermore, by looking at the everyday life of neutrality, my project also seeks to understand how a key symbol is consumed, articulated, talked about, felt, embodied and enacted by the people who make up the nation.

Supervisors

• Professor Cris Shore
• Dr Martin Webb

Supervisors

• Dr Alice Elliot
• Dr Henrike Donner

To find out more about Daisy Swift, visit their LinkedIn profile.

My PhD research is located in an engagement with several different queer and trans* communities that are currently developing in predominantly rural areas in Spain and Portugal.

In 2018, two in five LGBTI respondents in the EU (38 %) experienced hate-motivated violence and harassment, with transgender (48 %) and intersex (42 %) people indicating the highest rates of harassment, and most participants of minority backgrounds saying that race, ethnicity, religion, and disability created additional grounds for discrimination (FRA, 2019).

In the context of crisis, marked by violence and social inequalities affecting queer and trans people, amidst the climate crisis, there is an urgent need for imagining, creating, and documenting alternative ways of living. This research focuses on queer and trans* eco-communities that are gathering and living in rural spaces and their collective practices of ‘queer worlding’.

Worlding is “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come'' (Haraway, 2016, p. 31).

Elaborating on this concept, I focus on queer worlding, which centers around the co-creation of queer worlds and possible futures through the cultivation of shared practices, imaginaries, and desires. Therefore, with a focus on co-creative queer worlding practices, ranging from collective social, spiritual, ecological, and artistic practices, my research seeks to explore the development and experience of queer and trans* communities in rural settings.

Moving beyond essentialist notions of queerness as solely being formulated around a politics of shared identity or as being inherently located in urban contexts, this project, instead focuses on specific shared practices, imaginaries, and desires that are being activated to generate safer, and more sustainable communities, spaces, lives, and futures for LGBTQIA+ people and beyond.

For this project, I will use a range of collaborative, embodied and visual qualitative ethnographic research methods including queer worlding as experimental method, while drawing upon my own experiences as a queer and non-binary person working with alternative LGBTQIA+ communities to explore queer worlding as a radical tool for imagining and co-creating experimental modes of living in response to urgent social and environmental issues.

Supervisors

• Dr EJ Gonzalez-Polledo
• Isaac Marrero-Guillamón

To find out more about Rae Teitelbaum, visit their LinkedIn profile.