Research Projects
I like to create collaborations, partnerships and new conversations through the research project model funded by outside bodies. I'm always keen to generate research questions and problem solve how to take ideas into practical action, co-produced research and new avenues for existing research. My background is in literature and philosophy, but the research practices I curate include emerging technology, ethics, cognition, complex systems, social sciences and more.
Invented Futures
Public engagement:
Bristol Technology Festival 2022
Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics 2022
York Festival of Ideas 2022
School of Activism 2.0, 3.0
Being Human Festival 2022
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Collaborators
The Centre for Global Knowledge Studies, Cambridge University; Yard Theatre, London; Spike Island; Centre for Research in the Arts and Humanities Cambridge; Erasmus+; Centre for Gender and Technology and the Leverhulme Centre for Intelligence, Cambridge University; Bristol Digital Futures Institute; UCL Science and Technology Studies; East Street Arts, Birmingham; LU Arts, Loughborough; Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Literature.
Funding:
SETsquared/Natwest: £800
Private: £4,000
Rowntree Foundation: -
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Website: Invented Futures
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Doing Consciousness
Aims and questions:
There is a growing public understanding around diversity in brains and conscious experiences. This project brings together lived perspectives on "disordered" or damaged experience with perspectives on embodiment, language, and physical interaction to platform variations in conscious experience as a way to get to grips with what it is we do when do consciousness. This centres the public sphere, and the growing conversation around neurodiversity.
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Collaborators:
Plasticity Lab led by Professor Tamar Makin, Cambridge University; EDGE: Blurring the Borders between Art and Neuroscience e.V (Berlin); MIND Foundation Berlin
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Public engagement:
British Science Week 2022 with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London
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Funding
Upcoming
in tandem: live literature, politics and translation
Aims and questions
in tandem: live literature celebrates the polyvocal across sound, meaning and language. It is a series of public experiments that brings together writers to create a performative reading series that expands what translation can be in live practice.
Featuring Berlin-based writers and translators, drawing on the notion of multiplicity and attempting to establish an idea of what migratory poetics sounds like in Berlin now, this evening will engage with live aspects of translation.
This series of experiments and public readings is a way of recording poetic language, practice, and performance that accounts for its contemporary multiplicity.
An individual writer’s voice may contain multiple voices and influences that surround what is finally shared out loud. What resonates in us is what resonates through others. in tandem: live literature is an accessible public gathering that is open to all which centers what is spoken, listened to, lived and resonated in the live space.
The live aspect to each reading is an integral way of making sense of the polyvocal nature of the poetry of migration. What is at home and what is un-homely; what is an experience of separation or dislocation; and what is an experience of translation. These readings may exceed what words and their definitions do – language can also be material, as part of an inflection, an in-breath, or a silence.
I am interested in how the live space, the structure and placement of the readings, and the different perspectives on the role of translation in each writer’s practice work together to create something meaningful and, even, political.
What it means to live in translation may also come to the forefront. Not just how it sounds, but the politics of explaining, conforming, assimilating into a majority language or culture. This is also a question of form. I am interested in the possibility of creating a live reading with silence and gaps, slips of tongue and breath, and words that will always, in some sense, remain untranslated. What happens to the political act of translation when a writer finds mediums beyond language, re-makes a language for themselves, goes silent?
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Collaboration
The Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at Freie Universität; Lettrétage Literaturhaus
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Funding:
Lettrétage Berlin and the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe
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DEATH.io
Aims and questions
How does the public act towards their own death? What kinds of cultural changes are needed to allow a better relationship to death, dying and grieving to emerge in contemporary society?
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Collaborators:
Iternal.life (commercial)
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Public engagement
Life, Death and The Rest Festival 2019 documentary screening; field interviews and vox pops; Death.io website and public journalism; Iternal.life app
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Funding:
£150,000
