Research
Sociology of place, power and belonging, pursued through ethnography and visual methods. The research and the art practice share questions, fieldwork and, often, material.
The Discourse of Place
How official, religious and everyday narratives produce the meaning of a city, and how residents live with, resist or quietly rework the place they are told they inhabit. Based on long-term fieldwork in Tai'an, Shandong.
Related work: Desultory Narrative (photography); Desultory Narrative (documentary); University
Writing: Whose Place? Voice, Legitimacy, and the Discourse of Place
Home, Belonging and Precarity
What it takes to make a home, and to keep it, when political instability, displacement, border control and social exclusion make belonging uncertain, explored through autoethnography and socially engaged practice.
Related work: Home
Academic Work and Careers
The material and spatial conditions that make academic work possible, studied with the Tension Points in the Talent Pipeline project at the University of Galway, using creative and visual methods.
Writing: Making Academic Work Possible; Crafting Creative Disruption for Studying Academic Career Progression
Doctoral Thesis
Supervisor: Dr Mike Hynes
The Discourse of Place: An Ethnographic Study in Tai'an, a Non-Metropolitan City in Contemporary China
Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 22 interviews, participant observation and visual and documentary materials, the thesis combines thematic, Foucauldian discourse, visual and ethnographic analysis to study how the meaning of Tai'an is produced and contested.
It contributes methodologically by showing how ethnographic research can still be conducted in contemporary China despite increasing constraints on access, and theoretically by conceptualising place as a dynamic, non-neutral product of power relations and everyday practice, offering a way of thinking about the relationship among place, power and subjectivity.