Speakers

Luke Dickens (King’s College London)

Dr. Luke Dickens is an urban cultural geographer with an interdisciplinary background situated across work in the humanities and social sciences. He is known for his research exploring ideas of place, belonging, and citizenship within urban youth cultures, his innovative use of visual and participatory methods, and his sustained commitment to community collaborations and public engagement. His research has focused primarily in London, and draws on a wide range of policy, practitioner and community networks.

Emma Fraser (Lancaster University)

Dr. Emma Fraser is a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University. Emma’s work considers modern ruins and visual media in relation to urban experience and the writings of Walter Benjamin. She also writes about games and urban play across sociology, geography, game studies and media and cultural theory. Emma completed her PhD at the University of Manchester, working on a thesis about how we imagine the end of the city in video games, combining cultural and social theory with critical and cultural geography to form an interdisciplinary approach to ruins of a recent past (real and imagined), implicitly informed by Walter Benjamin’s theory of the image, allegory, and experience.

Lucie Glasheen (Queen Mary University)

Lucie Glasheen is a PhD researcher in Geography and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is interested in the ways in which new urban spaces are imagined, conceived of and represented, and in intersections between play, the politics of housing and public space. Her current research explores the relationship between children’s play and urban development in East London in the nineteen-thirties. Her work engages with cartoons, children’s literature, fictional and documentary film, newspapers, and council archives. Lucie sits on the executive committee of the Centre for Childhood Cultures and Literary London Society and co-runs the Children’s Literature Children’s Lives research cluster.

Sigrid Merx (Utrecht University)

Dr. Sigrid Merx is an Assistant Professor Theatre Studies at Utrecht University. Her current research focuses on the dramaturgy of contemporary socially engaged theatre and performance practices, in particular performative interventions in public space. Sigrid is part of the UU research group Urban Interfaces, the initiator of the minor Creative Cities and one of the core members of Platform-Scenography.

Robert Pfaller (Kunstuniversität Linz)

Robert Pfaller is a Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Theory at Kunstuniversität Linz. He is a founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group stuzzicadenti. In 2007 he was awarded The Missing Link prize by the Psychoanalytisches Seminar Zurich for connecting psychoanalysis with other scientific disciplines for the German edition of his book The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners (Die Illusionen der anderen. Ueber das Lustprinzip in der Kultur. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).

Emma West (University of Birmingham)

Dr. Emma West’s research examines the relationship between modernism and popular culture in early- and mid-twentieth century Britain. Her postdoctoral project, Revolutionary Red Tape: How state bureaucracy shaped British modernism, examines how public servants and official committees helped to commission, disseminate and popularise modern British art, design, literature and culture.

Nicolas Whybrow (University of Warwick)

Nicolas Whybrow is Professor of Urban Performance Studies and has been a member of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick since 2004. Recent books are Performing Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Art and the City (IB Tauris, 2011) and he is currently writing a book entitled Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe: the Work of Art in the Complex City (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2019). Currently, he leads a multi-medial research team in a 3-year UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project entitled Sensing the City: an Embodied Documentation and Mapping of the Uses and Tempers of Urban Place. The project’s findings will be presented at a public exhibition curated by Sarah Shalgosky at the Herbert Gallery, Coventry in January 2020 and in a co-authored publication entitled Urban Sensographies which he will edit (forthcoming Routledge, 2020).