Resurgent Places: Practice-based Repair Across the West Asia and North Africa Region

About the Project

The region spanning West Asia and North Africa (WANA) has historically been – and continues to be – made and unmade through colonial, extractive and militarist violence as well as through the imposition of discursive frameworks produced elsewhere. If in 1978 Edward Said identified ‘orientalism’ as the nineteenth-century knowledge system that paved the way to the Western colonisation of the ‘Middle East’, contemporary forms of ‘geographical profiling’ continue to portray and define the region as ‘a site of sectarian violence, of petroleum capitalism and a dumping ground of imperialist debris’ (Yıldırım, 2023).

Environmentally, the WANA region sits largely within an arid to semi-arid climate zone stretching from Mauritania to Central Asia. Its fragile ecosystems are vulnerable to drought and desertification – risks further compounded by global warming. This advancing ‘aridity line’ has been characterised as a ‘conflict shoreline’ where climate change and political conflict intertwine (Weizman and Sheikh, 2015). This intersection of colonial/military violence and environmental risk is a typical case of ‘group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Wilson Gilmore, 2017) in the sacrifice zones produced by racial capitalism.

We invite applications that advance place-(re)making practices as modes to address/redress these palimpsests of social, spatial and environmental injustices across the region, specifically those caused by the intersection of wars, colonisation and climate change.

Potential research questions

• What kind of reconstruction and repair work is needed after the deliberate unmaking of a place through physical destruction and cultural erosion?
• How can place-making practices remedy the rift between suppressed land-based epistemologies and the sedimentation of colonial projections, narratives and practices in that same place?
• How can a practice of radical place-making transform the conditions that produce violence and vulnerability under (settler) colonialism?

The successful applicant will shape the project and develop it through their own disciplinary, methodological or creative interests. We seek practice-based proposals that articulate creative methodologies and/or spatial strategies as tools to intervene within and resist cycles of mass destruction, protracted violence and ecological breakdown.

We understand practice in an expanded sense, including writing, poetry, visual arts, film and sound-based practices. We particularly welcome a focus on textual/linguistic frameworks. As well as these we are interested in forms of critical fabulation and storytelling that undo colonial overwritings of land to recover memories, practices and modes of relation embedded in place, with research projects that are situated in a specific place in the region or with a more translocal or transregional approach.

Potential research areas

This studentship is open to multiple areas of research, such as:

• attempts to recover indigenous/ecological/linguistic place-based knowledges threatened by war, genocide and economic neoliberalisation
• practices of ecological sustainability and resilience in war-torn zones and responses to responses to eco/genocides
• studies of land-based epistemologies, situated and ancestral knowledges handed down through storytelling, vernacular languages and traditional practice
• decolonisation of knowledge about land and place, for instance opposing botanical
• knowledge with indigenous plant knowledge, or cartographic knowledge with embodied knowledge
• investigations of multi-species assemblages and alliances to mark the interdependence of human and more-than-human survival.

Project partner

Founded in London in 2009, Mosaic Rooms is a leading arts organisation dedicated to supporting and promoting contemporary culture from the Arab world and beyond. They have long-standing commitment to social and ecological justice across the WANA region –multidisciplinary programme ‘War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds’ (2024–25).

Mosaic Rooms will provide:

• mentorship
• access to their archive and a network of institutions and communities both from and in the region
• dissemination opportunities for the candidate’s work.

Supervisors and research at UAL

• Elisa Adami has an expertise in the WANA region, decolonial ecologies and sustainable place-based practices rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. She will connect the student with UAL’s research centre Afterall (where she is a Research Fellow), CSM’s community of practice ‘Commoning Ecologies’ (of which she is co-convenor) and the PGR interest group on writing practices that has coalesced around the writing sessions she has run since 2022.
• Nadine Monem has an expertise in the WANA region and land-based and Indigenous research methods. Her work explores modes of knowledge production that unsettle coloniality through radical archival and expanded forms of critical practice. She brings extensive experience of supporting research-led projects, informed by long-term engagement with the cultural sector. Nadine will connect the student with CSM’s Fictions, Fabulations and Fugitivities research group (of which she is co-convenor).
• Caterina Albano has extensive supervisory experience and is CSM PhD coordinator. She publishes in fields of the cultural history and theory of emotion, trauma, memory politics, ethics of breath, specifically in connection to air vulnerability and ecological and social justice.

How to apply

See the application guidance and submit your application on our website.