In early 2024, I started a consultancy with We Made That for the Greater London Authority - specifically Transport for London and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. Through participatory research with communities across London, we will make public spaces safer and more inclusive for women, girls and gender diverse people.

Read more about the project on Yahoo News, and find the call for Citizen Scientists, here.

I am curating a conference at the intersection of research, art and activism around the theme of migrant citizenship and participation. This will take place at Bethanien in Berlin in June, hosted by Disruption Network Lab.

Together with an excellent team of co-curators - Johann Arens, Cherry Truluck, Alicja Rogalska and Miriam Lowack - I’ve been preparing a group exhibition including communal meals and workshops on rethinking food as a public service.

Our concept, with the working title Municipal Kitchens, was recently selected for nGbK’s new season, to be held between June and August 2024.

The new nGbK exhibition space is in the former McDonald’s at Alexanderplatz, so will be the perfect venue for hosting art, activism and discussions on de-privatising the kitchen.

Together with four scholars from the UK and Germany -Sonja Marzi, Henriette Bertram, Verena Frick, and Sophie Stevens -I recently received seed funding from the British Academy and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for a one-year project exploring the practices that bring the ‘feminist city’ into being.

We’re starting with a monthly reading group and plan to produce a podcast.

I’ll be speaking at an event on The Arts of Creative Collaboration at Bloomsbury Theatre. The focus is researchers working with artists - including composers and theatre-makers. I will be speaking about my work with Johann Arens on Another Provision.

Together with Henrietta Moore, I recently published a new paper in Environment and Planning C: Thinking vulnerability infrastructurally: Interdependence and possibility in Lebanon’s overlapping crises (open access).

The article critically examines various international actors’ definition of ‘vulnerability’ in a context of ever-deepening crisis in Lebanon - especially the overlapping refugee and infrastructure / ecological crises. It proposes a new, infrastructural and interdependent way of conceptualising what it means to be vulnerable. The hope is that such rethinking can also contribute to more productive approaches to addressing different forms of vulnerability.

Join Another Provision on Saturday, 24 June at 16:30 at the wonderful House of Annetta for a discussion with Cooperation Town, Blueprint Architects and National Food Service about alternative and community knowledge production around food and for food justice.

Followed by a free-of-charge community meal made from surplus food.

More info here

Ed Charlton, Jill Weintroub and I published a new article in Writingplace, titled ‘Urban Atmospherics’.

In it, we consider how an atmospheric attunement to place enables new ways of writing place. Specifically, we draw on fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg and reflect on the outcome of a remote, collective writing process pursued during months of lockdown, when our attention was dominated by talk of air and virality. We think about how our fieldwork provided us with an unsettling preview of the atmospheric anxieties to come, of a time when the very idea of the urban harboured an unseen and largely uncalibrated threat. Having developed a digital StoryMap as a way to host our written reflections, we also assess the importance of our cross-disciplinary method, especially when it comes to sensing and responding to these atmospheric circulations in less anxious, more critical terms.

I’ve recently been appointed member of the editorial board at the journal City. As a long-time avid reader and sometime contributor, I’m really excited about a chance to help shape the direction of the journal, which spans the divide between urban scholarship, activism and art.

For more information and to view past issues, see City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action on the publisher page.

I have a new chapter out in the book Embodying Peripheries, edited by Giuseppina Forte and Kuan Hwa via the Berkley Global Urban Humanities initiative, and published open access by Firenze University Press.

The text is based on work from my PhD and uses a phenomenological lens to think through the political meaning of everyday movements and leisure mobilities in and around Jerusalem.

The book will be launched this spring at the Milan Triennale.

With Another Provision, I will hold a participatory workshop on alternative food practices at 422 Arts in Manchester in April, as part of their programme ‘Fooooood and What’s In Between’.

Next to a shared meal with food pantry users, this will involve the design and build of a food space in the big hall. Participants will share their experiences with, and visions for, alternative models of community-based food provision.

Find photos and more information about the event here.

As the ‘Found Cities, Lost Objects’ exhibition opens at Southampton City Art Gallery this year, I will give a tour of the show and conduct a workshop with a group of 30 young curators in March.

More information about the event, which includes a discussion with artist Hannah Starkey, here.

Engage, the charity focusing on public and community-based arts, is organising a two-day event on collaborative and participatory approaches, called Gathering Momentum. As Another Provision, Johann and I will speak about our experiences working with people with lived experience of food injustice in work.

More information and tickets here.

For International Women’s Day on 8 March, I am organising and moderating the opening panel of the Bartlett’s symposium on Gender and Urban Equalities.

I will speak to Beth Hughes, a curator working with Lubaina Himid about the exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City.

Watch our one-hour discussion about they key themes of the show here.

I look forward to spending time in Jerusalem again this February. I will be based at the beautiful Kenyon Institute in Sheikh Jarrah, where I have a CBRL residential fellowship.

The Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin has a seminar series on Environmental (Un)Knowing: Exploring the nexus of epistemic and environmental injustice. As I’ve just submitted a paper on the (un)knowability of toxic waste (one I’d been sitting on for a long time), I was super happy to be invited to speak.

The talk will be online on Thursday 26 Jan at 17:00 CET. Register here.

After several Covid delays, I’m excited to finally take up a residency at the Centre for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin soon. ZK/U works at the intersection of urban planning, art and activism and deals with topics like infrastructures and migrant cities that are central to my work, so I’m thrilled to be able to take some time to experiment and exchange with other fellows.

We spoke about Another Provision at the Hans Sauer Foundation’s Circular Society Forum. I was in a really unfitting time zone so Johann introduced our work on the panel on ‘circular communities’ (in German)

I spoke at the 2022 Discard Studies Conference at New York University. I was especially excited to see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ waste-themed art works in the accompanying exhibition.