January 2025
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8 Reads
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1 Citation
Critical African Studies
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January 2025
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8 Reads
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1 Citation
Critical African Studies
October 2022
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203 Reads
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12 Citations
Political Geography
Street artists around the world have been prominent in depicting issues concerning COVID-19, but the role of street art in public-making during the pandemic is unexplored. Despite burgeoning street art scenes in many African countries since the early 2000s, African street art is relatively neglected in critical street art scholarship. In response, this paper examines street art created during the pandemic in East African countries, principally Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, and explores the ways in which it is engaged in highly distinctive forms of public-making. Drawing primarily on qualitative online interviews with East African artists creating street art, and image analysis using online search tools, the paper argues that street art in urban areas is attempting to create knowledgeable publics through countering disinformation about the pandemic, to responsiblize publics through public health messaging and, through community activism, to build resilient publics. The paper concludes that street art is potentially an important tool in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in East African countries due to the proximity, and mutual constitution of, creative practices and publics, which emerge from the embedding of street art within the social spaces of cities and everyday experiences of the pandemic.
July 2022
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28 Reads
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4 Citations
Environment and Planning E Nature and Space
This paper argues for engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants to better conceptualise the ethics and contested ecologies associated with biodiversity loss. It focuses specifically on proteas, the iconic species of South Africa's threatened fynbos biome, to explore the possibilities of an ethical dialogue between human and more-than-human diversities, and to consider what might be gained from understanding plants as both agentic in contested ecologies and as storytelling figures worthy of attention. The paper draws on John Ryan’s conceptualization of phytography as a way of engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants. It teases out interwoven botanic and human histories, and the ways in which iconic proteas have written themselves into the narratives of their human interlocutors in the context of European settler colonialism, conservation, floral nativism and post-apartheid nation-building. The case for phytography is developed through an examination of the corporeal rhetoric of proteas in two examples. The first concerns the Mace Pagoda, a protea that resists narratives of extinction by writing back its percipience, agency, and resilience into human stories of anthropogenic habitat loss. The second focuses on botanical traces that result from absence, specifically the non-appearance in recent years of proteas in the Cederberg area of the Western Cape. The paper suggests that absence is a form of corporeal rhetoric through which plants write themselves into narratives of rapid climate change and multispecies loss. The final section of the paper explores questions of ethics that emerge from engaging with plants as storytellers, reflects on the kinds of human-plant relationships that are possible in the context of environmental catastrophe, and examines the possibilities that phytography provides for more-than-human engagements with plant life.
April 2022
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69 Reads
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7 Citations
This paper contributes to social and cultural geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic through an exploration of the role of UK street art in documenting the remarkable shifts in the practice of wearing facemasks, the tensions and emotions involved, and the transformations in the meaning of facemasks during the pandemic. Street art has become an important outlet for political critique and social engagement, capturing the public mood in response to policies and recommendations attempting to stem viral transmission, including the requirement to wear facemasks in some public places. Drawing primarily on image analysis of street artworks produced during 2020 and sourced using online search tools, and qualitative interviews with UK street artists in 2020 and 2021, the paper first explores the changing geographies and politics of street art during the pandemic. It then examines the ways in which street art portrays mask-wearing simultaneously as reassuring, protective and fear-inducing, and reflects the meaning of masks in relation to protecting public health, managing anxieties concerning health risks, boosting morale, and symbolising solidarity and public spiritedness. The paper argues that pandemic street art contributes to public dialogue by articulating emotion and deeply held concerns, and communicating the intimate politics, semiotic meanings and social properties of objects associated with disease.
August 2021
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410 Reads
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4 Citations
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Every society deploys narratives concerning the phenomenon of domestic abuse which serve to downplay and normalise it. Drawing on qualitative research with survivors in Malaysia, and working from a feminist postcolonial framework, this paper explores how the notion of demonic possession is used by survivors and perpetrators as a metaphor for domestic abuse, and a narrative to make sense of and excuse it. The idea of demonic possession has utility because of its close fit both with perpetrators’ behaviour and the symptoms experienced by survivors with trauma. The research focuses on the intimate dynamics of abuse, including coercive control and intimate captivity, and the pivotal role of possession and trauma in the successful exertion of control and in extending the damaging effects of abuse. We argue that demonic possession reflects another way in which globally endemic practices of domestic abuse are justified and explained; it provides a means for perpetrators to evade responsibility for abuse, and a way in which the pernicious effects of both abuse and trauma on survivors, their families, and wider society are sometimes dismissed. The paper highlights the significance of culturally‐sensitive approaches to domestic violence and trauma as a counterpoint to western‐centric understandings. It also stresses the need for locally generated approaches to awareness raising and support services in Malaysia and elsewhere.
June 2021
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347 Reads
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5 Citations
Learning and Teaching
Targets set by the UK Office for Students require highly academically selective UK universities to enrol a greater percentage of students identified as least likely to participate in higher education. Such students are typically at a disadvantage in terms of levels of academic preparedness and economic, cultural and social capital. Drawing on eighteen interviews with first-generation students at Durham University, we identify five sites of pressure: developing a sense of belonging within the terms of an elite university culture, engagement in student social activities, financial worries, concerns about academic progress, and self-transformation. Based on these insights, we argue that support for first-generation scholars will require that universities recognise and redress elitist cultures that discourage applications from prospective first-generation scholars and prevent those who do enrol from having the best educational and all-round experience.
April 2021
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491 Reads
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28 Citations
The growing realisation in the global North that capitalism and the conditions of the Anthropocene no longer create the conditions for life represents a profound unsettling of the philosophical foundations underpinning ideas about modernity and progress. However, for millions of people around the world this is nothing new, since colonized peoples have experienced this reality since the advent of capitalism. The dominant presentation of the Anthropocene ignores the role of systems, such as colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy and erases the racialised history of extractive colonialism that has given rise to this form of globalism. In response, this chapter discusses the significance of decolonizing the Anthropocene and the challenges this poses, in particular, for postcolonial theory. It discusses the ways in which postcolonial theory problematizes the Eurocentrism of and the epistemic violence created by framing the Anthropocene as a universalizing and silencing concept.
July 2020
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44 Reads
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4 Citations
Area
In this commentary I explore the groundbreaking interventions of Jacky Tivers’ (1978) ‘How the other half lives’ (Area 10, 4, 302‐6). I recount both the context in which I first read and was inspired by the paper and the significance of the context in which it was written to highlight its contribution in focusing attention on two specific issues: the underrepresentation of women as producers of geographical knowledge and the exclusion of women’s issues as a focus of geographical inquiry. I argue that the paper broke new ground in the context of British geography by demonstrating the connections between the domination of the discipline by men and what was considered legitimate geographical knowledge, as well as demanding that the latter be addressed through the explicit study of the geography of women and gender relations. I reflect on the courage it took to challenge the status quo in 1970s geography and conclude with some thoughts on the contemporary resonances of the issues with which the paper was concerned.
June 2019
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47 Reads
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19 Citations
June 2017
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31 Reads
... While we want to avoid overly celebratory accounts of quiet sustainability where such practices may seem marginal to an increasingly industrialized food system, pointing out some sustainable effects of traditional wet markets and recent attempts in the city to build on their roles in community building and service provision is important and not insignificant in scale. Recognition of these and other diverse forms of sustainable consumption chimes with a wider literature on ethical consumption in settings of emerging and rising power economies including research in South Africa (McEwan et al., 2025) and Brazil (Afonso et al., 2024) as connected studies in our ESRC-funded research. However, there is also an important point to make about theorizing back to the Global North from this research. ...
January 2025
Critical African Studies
... The integration of performance and phytopoetics relies on efforts to de-anthropomorphize performance and move beyond viewing plants merely as objects or decorative elements in artistic creation. This approach seeks to recognize the creative agency of plants [21] (p. 1117). ...
July 2022
Environment and Planning E Nature and Space
... A consortium of arts and health that emerged around 2001 is based in and finds inspiration in an array of approaches from scientific medicine, public health, psychology, and sociology. In the context of global health, we have come to refer to this field under the broader rubric of global health studies, a truly interdisciplinary area of inquiry drawing upon both social sciences and, more recently, international and global studies [1,2]. There is no gold standard test or convincing body of general evidence to advocate for or against the health-promoting and diverse role of the arts in different cultures and societies. ...
October 2022
Political Geography
... Much of this work has examined the sharp sociospatial inequalities accompanying the pandemic, and efforts to respond to them (Lutpon & Willis, 2021). There have been calls for greater attention to vulnerability and death (Shchglovitova & Pitas, 2022), including differential vulnerabilities amongst elderly groups (Osborne & Meijering, 2021) or people with learning disabilities (Macpherson et al., 2021;Van Holstein et al., 2023), and research on how the pandemic intersects with social geographies of health, mobility, housing, employment, care, prisons and the arts (Ho & Maddrell, 2021;McEwan et al., 2022;Schliehe et al., 2022). To take one example, in a rich account of how garment workers experienced the pandemic in Cambodia, Brickell et al. (2022) revealed the social knock-on effects of restrictions as workers received reduced wages which led to them eating less, struggling to pay back debt, and becoming increasingly worn out. ...
April 2022
... Therefore, it is unclear what belonging is, how it is experienced by a diverse student body, and why exactly it is important. It is, however, noted that underrepresented students can have difficulties developing a sense of belonging (Gagnon 2018;Hindle et al. 2021) and that they may also feel a lesser sense of belonging in comparison to their white counterparts (Cureton and Gravestock 2019). Students' feelings of social acceptance are associated with their sense of belonging to the university (Freeman, Anderman, and Jensen 2007). ...
June 2021
Learning and Teaching
... The dominant forms of decolonial critique of the Anthropocene seeks to subvert modernist colonial logic of the Anthropocene, particularly its framing of human-nature relationships and responsibility for a more sustainable future (Chiato & Chandler, 2022;Haraway, 2016). Contemporary theorizations of the Anthropocene privilege anthropocentric perspectives (McEwan, 2021). In this way, dominant forms of decolonial critique seeks to challenge the liberal modernist assumptions underpinning global ecological crisis that marks the Anthropocene. ...
April 2021
... The theory challenges Western knowledge and the Eurocentric academic model (Pollard et al., 2011). It critiques the Eurocentric model of academia, aiming to dismantle the idea of value-free and universal knowledge (Schmidt & Neuburger, 2017). ...
January 2011
... In addition, grand historical meta-narratives of injustice, contending with the theoretical idea of "global" and "speaking for the oppressed" (Pappas 2017), are pitfalls that must be avoided. A needed balance can be found by incorporating other modes of decolonial thought, such as contrapuntal analysis (Said 1993), psychodynamic perspectives (Fanon 1961;Nandy 1989), economic analysis (Pollard et al. 2011) and historical and literary criticism (James 1993;Gopal 2019), amongst others. Because of limitations of the theory, we believe it is important to incorporate the wider critical science view introduced in the previous section. ...
January 2011
... Postergadas de las exploraciones, actividades percibidas como demasiado arriesgadas, sufrieron un menoscabo en la producción de sus obras (Siegel 2004). En gran medida, las mujeres no recorrían el territorio; solo algunas se atrevieron a acompañar a sus maridos en sus viajes y pudieron ver, desde su mundo interior, el paisaje que les rodeaba (McEwan 2000). Ellas develaron relaciones socioculturales desconocidas hasta entonces y se aproximaron de manera más íntima a las mujeres que encontraron en el camino (Kearns 1997). ...
June 2019
... As these histories show, governments have played an important role in the trajectory of ethical conduct in both industries. While the civil society actors that we evoked to mobilize consumers have shown the capacity to establish the ground for change under certain circumstances, as in coffee, their ability to bring about an enduring long-term solution for unethical conduct in GVCs on their own on a scale needed to address the issue at hand appears to be limited (Gethin & Pons, 2024;Locke, 2013;McEwan et al., 2017). ...
January 2017