Moving beyond oil from below through creative practice and urban artivism for the transition to post-fossil fuels cities

About the Project

As many countries grapple with the transition towards a regime of renewable energies, fossil fuels continue to determine the daily existence of the majority of the world’s population. Oil is the culprit hiding behind modern cultural production, from vinyl records to fashion, it continues to flow and inform our imagination. Like with many other societal issues, climate change has magnified our need to move beyond our reliance on crude oil by-products.

This research project investigates how oil capitalism is contested at the scale of creative practice. It shifts the focus from macro-issues of global oil capitalism towards ground-up cultural forms of critique and creative resistance to the effects of the oil industry on the instrumentalisation of public art, inclusive mobility, inequalities of access to public space and to culture more broadly. With particular interest, but not restricted to, oil producing countries. The research adopts an international perspective to explore the work of creative practitioners (artists, designers, architects) that engage in producing objects, installations and/or tactical performative actions to interrogate the cultural politics and aesthetics of oil dependency. From ERRE's The Game of Deception (Mexico), Ernst Logar’s Invisible Oil (Austria), to Assemble's Cineroleum (United Kingdom) and Ana Alenso's Medusa's Fossil Addiction (Venezuela), it seeks to reveal and examine the role of small-scale creative practices in critiquing oil-based modernity and constructing alternative narratives to create pre-figurative post-fossil fuel worlds.

The research is situated in the remit of the Energy Humanities, a field whose emergence coincides with the crises of the oil economy of the late twentieth century, which generated an urgency in understanding how oil became the world’s dominant energy commodity in order to develop critical analysis of the symbolic and cultural forms of oil capitalism. The project is informed by Dr Penélope Plaza’s research on the relation between culture, politics, oil and urban space, alongside her urban activism in Venezuela as co-founder of the not-for-profit CollectiVoX and former member of the urban collective Ser Urbano. This multidisciplinary research intersects cultural studies, urban sociology, energy humanities and architecture. It offers the opportunity to engage in a mix of qualitative research methods (archival work, interviews, ethnography, artistic), including digital methods (social network sites, netnography, small data).

University of Reading:

The University of Reading, located west of London, England, is ranked at 172 globally, according to the QS World University Rankings 2025. 98% of research at the University is of international standing (REF 2021, combining the University’s world leading, internationally excellent and internationally recognised submissions). The University’s main Whiteknights Campus is set in 130 hectares of beautiful, award-winning parkland, less than a 30-minute train ride to London Paddington and is approximately 30 miles from London Heathrow airport.

During your PhD at the University of Reading, you will expand your research knowledge and skills, receiving supervision and training in a number of different forms. We also provide dedicated training in important transferable skills that will support your career aspirations. If you need to develop your academic English skills before you start your studies, then the University has an excellent Global Academy which can help with this.

Eligibility:

• Applicants should have a good bachelor’s degree (minimum of a UK Upper Second (2:1) or equivalent)/master’s degree in a related discipline.
• International applicants will also need to meet the University’s English Language requirements. We offer pre-sessional English courses that can help with meeting these requirements.

*The University of Reading is committed to a policy of equal opportunities and non-discriminatory treatment for all members of its community.*

How to apply:

Submit an application for a PhD in Architecture via our online application system.

Further information:

Architecture PhD webpage

Enquiries:

Dr Penélope Plaza e-mail : p.plaza@reading.ac.uk