Research

Curation, museums and gender

I am a Postdoctoral Early Career Researcher for the GlobalGRACE project, in which I’m working with international colleagues using collaborative creative research methods to examine – and to promote – social equality and wellbeing.

Within this role, I co-curated and built the online archive for the exhibition Exchanging Cultures of Equality, and am lead curator of our upcoming exhibition, due to launch in Cape Town in 2021. Major themes we are exploring include methods towards decolonising museums and exhibitionary practices and emphasising feminist praxis within curated spaces, including online archives.

Concurrently, I am working with women in the UK museum sector to document their experiences and attempts to forge careers within institutions that are coded as white/ male/ elite.

Asylum: LGBTQ+ experience and neoliberal norms

I am co-editor of the book Asylum For Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry (PM Press, Sept 2020), which brings together scholars, activists, artists, and journalists critically engaging with how asylum systems internationally function under neoliberal capitalism.

My doctoral dissertation focused on the experiences of LGBT asylum seekers and NGOs in the United States, and asks: How do NGOs shape popular and political understandings of LGBT asylum seekers in the United States? Concurrently, how do their activities impact the lives of the individuals they support? I am currently revising this text for publication as a book. See here for other publications on this topic.

I produced the 30 minute documentary Still Life with Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST) in 2019, and contributed multimedia elements to the play ‘How I Became An Asylum Seeker’ written by Lydia Besong before directing a film version of the play in 2010 .

The Art of Protest

I curated the 2017 exhibition Protest Matters! in Washington D.C., a satellite event of the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. I am interested in material culture of protest and the uses of public/private spaces as sites of “resistance” – particularly in response to the Trump administration – and as sites of community-creation and political reclamation – particularly in relation to LGBTQ+ justice movement-building.