Current Research

Feeling Public
On Getting Lost
Emotional Biennials
Fiction Feeling Frame
RELAY
Gentrification as Hate

FEELING PUBLIC (2020 - )

The question of what it means to feel public lies at the centre of twenty-first-century life. Such a question demands interdisciplinary research spanning the publicness of space and cities (architecture, urban planning, design, policy), the publicness of digital acceleration (tech ethics, digital publics, platforms and broadcasting), and the publicness of belonging, difference and inequality (sociology, cultural infrastructure, humanities).

This project looks to develop an understanding of the changing ways publicness comes to be felt by interrogating the geographies of affect and emotion, the histories and colonialities of the understanding and performances of publicness, and reconsiders these through grounded theoretical approach in four geographically, cultural distinct cities. Building off of decolonial, queer and feminist scholarship, the project aims to operationalise the call to retheorise central tenets of the ‘urban’ from new sites, spaces and times, and in relation with new critical lenses. A critical examination of the concept of public, publicness, and public space within urban discourse, practice and experience is, then, a central research objective. The method will be to apply the lens of cultural infrastructure, inequalities and emotional geography to that question.