Author: drury

My doctoral project investigates the entanglements between the surface of the image and the depth of the earth. In the face of ecological disaster and extractive ruination, a heightened attention to the underground sees a parallel in the contemporary centrality of the ‘deep’ in relation to AI systems and processes of automated perception, from data mining to deep learning. The paradigm of depth extends from geology to the domains of machinic cognition, yet this extension is not purely metaphorical: it is precisely through these ‘deep’ ways of sensing, imaging and knowing that humans can see, and excavate further, the depths of the earth. I argue that this entanglement of extraction and visibility regimes cannot be understood without a critical examination of the historical co-production of the imperial scopic and geological imaginations. To this aim, the project mobilises a series of entwined historical and contemporary cases in which the multiscalar relationships between more-than-human ways of seeing and the geological column trouble the oppositions between surface and depth, human and machine, representation and operation.

Dámaso Randulfe is a senior lecturer and a coordinator of Critical and Contextual Studies at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University; an associate lecturer at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art; and an editor of Migrant Journal, a publication series on the spatial politics of human and other-than-human migrations. Dámaso’s work and various collaborative projects have been presented at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, Venice Biennale, Triennale de Milano, Architectural Association, Design Museum, Ivorypress or The Showroom. Dámaso is currently a LAHP/AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art researching entangled ecologies of vision and extraction.

My PhD research is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods study examining how environmental perspectives are translated between the worlds of Indigenous peoples and the world of international politics. It aims to implement innovative digital methods of data production, analysis, and visualisation to contribute to the decolonisation of environmental governance narratives and aspire to more just and effective practices.

International environmental discourse will be digitally analysed through data collected and compiled from the Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC-COP) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD-COP). Meanwhile, participatory digital storytelling with members of an Amazonian Cocama community will co-produce audio and visual data capturing their perspectives on and concerns for the territory they inhabit. Analysis of these data will explore traditional concepts for which translation into European languages is problematic and the vernacularisation of scientific concepts.

Sarah Capes
I hold a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies and a master’s in Philosophy. In both instances, I focused particularly on issues of social injustice, my MA culminating in a dissertation on universal moral duties in the context of international structural injustice. I have a PGCE in modern foreign languages, and my cosmopolitanist teaching style is consciously grounded in the real world. I have assisted Leverhulme-funded research on Indigenous peoples’ food security in the international environmental regime, and I have managed a research expedition in the Peruvian Amazon collecting biodiversity, climate change and community conservation data.

The submitted topic of doctoral study requires from the applicant an interdisciplinary (ethnology and anthropology – archiving – digital humanities) and theoretical-applied approach (interpretation and heuristics – creation of practical outputs and methodologies). It focuses on current approaches and trends in the design and construction of digital scientific collections in the humanities, especially in ethnology and anthropology. Emphasis is placed on the problem of metadata structures of scientific collections, the applicability of scientific collections in the practice of humanities research and their further perspective use (scientific and non-scientific). The study also includes professional activities at the Department of Scientific Collections of IESA SAS, including the practical preparation and creation of specific sets of digital scientific collections. 

The herbarium of Hans Sloane (1660-1753) comprises 260 volumes and about 130,000 specimens. It is a well-studied collection, but it is difficult to access and to comprehend its scale, complexity, and limitations. Part of my work combines a folio-by-folio review of all the volumes, and the creation and analysis of an enriched XML version of James Dandy’s catalogue, The Sloane Herbarium (1958). Together, these approaches identify gaps and silences in the way the collection has been mediated to us. They suggest new data-driven and archival activities that will make visible the working methods, and knowledge production practices and constraints of the past, and offer an enhanced and extensible model that will support future research with the collection. 

Brad Scott is a second year PhD student at Queen Mary University of London and the Natural History Museum. His research encompasses the global and colonial contexts of the Sloane Herbarium, probably the largest plant collection of its era in the world. Combining close readings of archival catalogues with digital humanities techniques, and case studies of specific collectors, his research explores the creation of plant knowledges in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Previously, Brad worked for 30 years in digital academic publishing, combining new product development with XML data design and workflow planning. He is also a field botanist, specialising in mosses. 

My working thesis title is Disrupting Digital Girlhood: exploring the performativity of female identity in digital space through autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice. My research is interested in social media as a digital disrupter to social order and looks to shift social media from the disruptER to the disruptED, with radical autobiographical performance as a mode of disruption. The project has two central interconnecting aims: Firstly, to interrogate how adolescent girls inhabit and narrate themselves in performative digital spaces. Secondly, to understand how forms of socially engaged and applied performance can disrupt, interrogate, and critically re-evaluate digital performance, enabling adolescent girls to re-position themselves as empowered, critical digital content creators and consumers.

Molly Wilson is a researcher in feminist performance practice. With a background in applied theatre, Molly obtained an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2020 in Arts, Creativity and Education. She is now undertaking a practice research PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, in collaboration with Little Fish Theatre; her doctoral research is concerned with performative gender in digital spaces and the power of autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice.

This thesis proposes a dialogical reading of theatre’s movements – travelling texts, actors, directors, and characters on the stage– and the ‘travelling turn’ (Erll, 2011) in Memory Studies, a recently defined subset of the disciple which has offered insights into memory’s transnational and mobile qualities. The terrain here explored is an imaginary borderland—a route connecting Spain and the Former Yugoslavia—which has been theatrically imagined with surprising frequency. Through a focus on transnational productions that deliberately entangle the histories of these two regions, I explore the repeated motif of the traveller and his/her theatrical function. 

Spain and the Former Yugoslavia offer a rich interconnected history to explore the relationship between travel and memory. It is estimated that between 1936 and 1939 over 1,600 Yugoslavs travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War. The volunteers became national symbols of the fight against fascism in the Balkans and are today referred to as transnational heroes: ‘Naši Španci’ [our Spaniards]. During the war in Yugoslavia, and in the two decades following the country’s dissolution, engagement with the Spanish Civil War came to occupy a prominent role in the region’s artistic output. Representation of the ideological divide in Spain of the 1930s provided an avenue for Yugoslav artists to critically examine the history of internal strife in the Balkans, whilst simultaneously avoiding overt mention of local politics. One example of this phenomenon has been the long-standing interest in Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s emblematic play about the Spanish Civil War, ¡Ay, Carmela! Conversely, Spanish news-coverage of the dissolution of Yugoslavia (and, in particular, the Siege of Sarajevo) brought up long-standing questions regarding yet-unaddressed traumas of the Spanish Civil War, e.g. with respect to exhumation, memory politics, and (more recently) secession. These questions have been explored by authors and playwrights such as Clara Usón, Slobodan (Boban) Minic, Hadi Kurich, Juan Mayorga, and Laila Ripoll, amongst others, through the creation of parallels with the Former Yugoslavia. Taking these historical entanglements into account, I explore how engagement with ‘other’ civil wars in countries that have their own experience with dissolution has allowed artists a critical lens with which to explore local issues—while appearing to do precisely the opposite. 

Alma Prelec is an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London) and Stipendiary Lecturer in the Sub-Faculty of Spanish (Humanities Division) at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Central, she trained on the postgraduate course at the Oxford School of Drama and completed a BA and Clarendon-funded MSt at the University of Oxford, specialising in Golden Age and Contemporary Spanish theatre.From 2020-2021 she was co-editor of the MHRA journal, Working Papers in the Humanities, and she is currently editorial assistant at Contemporary Theatre Review. Forthcoming publications include ‘From Golden Age to Civil War: Stages of Spain in Yugoslavia’ inDaring Adaptations, Creative Failures and Experimental Performance in Iberian and Transnational Contexts (Liverpool University Press, 2023) and The Eyes, an English translation of Pablo Messiez’ Los ojos (MHRA New Translations, 2023). She has collaborated with various cultural institutions, including the London ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), the Theatre Times, and the Instituto Cervantes in London.

My research is broadly concerned with the relationship between finance and the social. It builds upon the Marxist understanding that finance ‘socialises’ capital (within the confines of capitalism itself) and uses this to inform critical engagement with contemporary proposals for – and experiments in – the “socialisation” or “democratisation” of finance. In addition to analysing the existing literature, I conduct participatory observation within groups and networks in Europe experimenting with the socialisation of finance through cryptocurrency. My aim here is to clarify the categories of labour, production, value, and the social that inform progressive experiments in socialist finance. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s (1993) interpretation of Marx, I identify a tendency within these proposals and experiments to focus narrowly on the sphere of distribution (the market and private property) while taking for granted the continuation of industrial production and the form of labour in capitalism. My research aims to move beyond the limitations of this one-sided approach and to explore the shifts in labour and production that would be necessary in order for finance to be truly social(ised). I approach this by revisiting anthropological accounts of indigenous economies, particularly that of Māori in pre-colonial Aotearoa, in order to understand historical articulations of the relationship between finance and the social in non-capitalist societies. I explore how, rather than “socialising” finance, Māori and other indigenous peoples realised the already social characteristics of “financial” logics such as debt (i.e. as expressed in the logic of utu) in the reproduction of (non-capitalist) social life. I do not advocate for the appropriation of indigenous forms of finance but rather draw from them in order to highlight the historically specific character of the divisions between the social and private, abstract and concrete, and circulation and production.

Catherine Comyn is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at King’s College London. Grounded in historical materialism, her work is centrally interested in intersections of finance capital and colonisation, and possibilities for their overcoming. She is the author of The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (ESRA, 2023) and a contributor to the volume The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance, and Inequality (Manchester University Press, 2023). She was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, of Māori and Pākehā descent, and relocated to the UK in 2018. She is a researcher at Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA).

How can sound provide a deeper understanding of South Asian Islam? What can the study of Qawwali music teach us about religious identities in modern South Asia? How does sacred music defy constructions of nationhood in contemporary Pakistan?Despite Qawwali’s spiritual significance for South Asian Muslims and popularity as “Sufi” music, there has been limited scholarly research on the social lives and performance-histories of its hereditary practitioners. I aim to conduct an ethnographic study on the transformation of Qawwali in Pakistan since its 1947 partition, through the lens of some of its oldest hereditary practitioners called the “Qawwal Bachche,” most of whom migrated to Karachi during partition and continue to perform there till today. Based on my formal music apprenticeship with a member of the Qawwal Bacche over six years, I propose that despite being used as a distinctly Muslim marker of Pakistan’s national identity, it is a heterogeneous tradition that operates across a hybrid of quasi-religious (sacred and entertainment) spaces and a multiplicity of musical genres. These continue to negotiate and challenge a singular normative Islam, often traversing beyond identity, borders, and citizenship, as evident through its oldest hereditary specialists’ oral histories and diverse repertoires. While I wish to corroborate this hypothesis through further fieldwork and archival research, I also aim to use a cross-disciplinary approach for this study on Qawwali, combining perspectives from the anthropology of Islam, sound studies, and South Asian studies. Through this project, I wish to encourage a richer discourse on overlapping Indic and Islamicate musical traditions that continue to inhabit modern South Asia.

Wajiha Naqvi is a vocalist, song-writer and music researcher from Pakistan. She is a student of North Indian classical music and has been featured as a lead artist in Coke Studio Pakistan, one of the country’s premiere music shows. She has a Master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University with a background in the anthropology of sacred music from the Islamic world. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral degree in music at King’s College London where she focuses on the social histories and musical repertoire of hereditary North Indian classical and Sufi music practitioners living in Pakistan. 

In this presentation, we discuss the evolution of a PhD project that began with a focus on social philosophy and philosophy of technology, examining the impact of design features of digital environments, such as social media, on reasoning about universal moral norms. As the project progressed, a shift in methodological interests and the realization that the initial topic was very broad led to a focus on AI ethics, particularly the intersection of the performativity of ML applications and normative ethics of AI.

Initially, the research centered on discourse ethics in digital environments, yielding preliminary insights into whether the implicit anthropological assumptions, on which J. Habesmas’ theory of communicative action is based, are still relevant in the age of planetary computation. Recognizing some limitations of the discourse ethics framework, as well as the profound influence of AI systems features on moral reasoning in algorithmically infused societies, since early 2022, the project has transitioned to explore the normative implications of performative prediction in AI systems.

The current research questions are centered on the capacity of AI systems to influence populations by making predictions about them. Can performative predictions be equivalent to prescriptions? Can performative prediction have normative content? Where does this content come from? These questions are also relevant in the context of social philosophy, philosophy of technology, and media philosophy, as they illuminate the importance of assessing AI systems as human-computer interaction systems, not just formal systems.

By bridging the gap between initial research on discourse ethics in digital environments and the current focus on AI ethics and performative prediction, this presentation demonstrates the dynamic nature of philosophical inquiry, and emphasizes the significance of addressing evolving research questions in the broader political context.

Mykhailo Bogachov is a Ukrainian researcher and curator, interested in normativity in technology and art. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine. BA in Literature, MA in Philosophy (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, 2012-2018). Ph.D. student at H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, Ukraine. Assistant curator at Ukho Music, a curatorial agency specializing in contemporary classical, experimental, and improvisational music. Previously worked as a PR manager at several Ukrainian organizations for music and film, and as a freelance journalist in music and art criticism. Co-founder of Open Library of Fine Arts (Kyiv). Temporarily based in Germany (Leibniz Universität Hannover).

Berlin Spring School Abstract

My research brings methods from expanded scenography into dialogue with critiques of public space and placemaking practices, proposing a design-informed methodology for discussing queer placemaking as a collection of social and material practices. In this presentation, I discuss how walking and mapping can be considered as expanded scenographic methods in order to draw attention to the temporal and affective qualities of environments. A scenographic understanding of place is one that hinges on affect and atmosphere, and walking has potential to function as a method through which to examine these affective and scenographic contours. Additionally, as “scenography is not static. It is unfixed and unstable and cannot be experienced from a static position” (Lotker & Gough, 2013:6), walking provides a transient way to experience this unfixedness and imagine new spatial possibilities. From this position, I explore how the ephemera around walking can be considered part of a critical cartographic process, with the potential to map creative representations of place. This could include considering place as a felt phenomenon, engaging with histories and memory, or imagining futures. Through presenting my initial practice-led explorations in walking and mapping, I question what the scenographic, as an orchestration of different materialities, textures, and atmospheres, might offer in terms of developing queer understandings of place and placemaking.

Nic Farr is a LAHP-funded PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Their research focuses on examining practices of queer placemaking through a scenographic lens. They are also a visual artist and performance designer specialising in experimental and devised work, often made in collaboration with activist or community groups.