MPhil/PhD Visual Culture

Research in the department is organised around the following thematic clusters:

• Culture, Memory, Futurity
• Environmental Humanities and Ecologies
• Globalisation and Transcultural practices
• Performance and Live Art
• Philosophy, Critical and Visual Theory
• Political Aesthetics
• Sexes, Genders, Genres
• Spatial Practice and Architecture
• Technologies of Image and Sound
• The Curatorial

Culture, Memory, Futurity

In this cluster we explore the ways in which the present is structured by a relation to the past and the future. We attend to memory as a collective as well as an individual faculty: something that, in a globalized environment, is produced across geographical, cultural and political borders. We also focus on the various ways in which memory might be blocked (by trauma, or by unconscious and/or political repression), an interest in how disavowed and blocked memories can function as ‘residual culture’ and ‘hauntological’ spectres and, indeed, how the past might itself be ‘re-fictioned’ within the present.

Environmental Humanities and Ecologies

In this research cluster we explore visual practices and interventions that address unavoidable questions concerning environmental crises and ecological sustainability, human and non-human geographies, ‘the animal question’ and sociologies of everyday lifeThese themes are approached from an interdisciplinary view of the arts and sciences.

Globalization and Transcultural practices

In this cluster we chart connections and collisions between territorial claims, postcolonial translations and global circulations. Thinking beyond local and global distinctions, our research is situated within the transgressive spaces between established practices and knowledges. As such, we navigate between inherited bodies of postcolonial knowledge, human geography, transcultural memory, urbanisation, questions of regionality and more recent discourses on crises of financialization, migrancy, debt, planetary resources and precarity.