This PhD emerges out of my interest in gender, ecology, culture and spatial practices, which have coalesced through my experience of community gardening alongside my Alevi-Kurdish neighbours and encountering their practices and beliefs and learning about their struggles elsewhere.
Since my MA at The Royal College of Art I have sought to elicit thinking about gender and its role in shaping the cultural landscape where the place of women seems fragile. I am highly self-motivated: through independent research projects, supported by the Arts Council England, I have worked with archives and conducted semi-structured interviews to piece together otherwise invisible histories to find ways to make them visible and learn from those histories where they resonate with the present. I have done this through contributing to symposiums, writing for Huffington Post, exhibition making, organising seminars and giving lectures at intuitions including The Royal Academy of Art, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Much of this research has been focused on feminist collectivity and childcare, drawing out the relationship between the work women traditionally do, caring for others, and the work of caring for the earth. I have worked as an archival researcher for exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery looking at radical histories in the local area and the museum’s engagement with local organisations and communities.
I was commissioned to make a series of podcasts exploring social housing and civic participation with, amongst others, The Women’s Budget Group. I contributed to the conference The Role of Culture in a Divided Europe, in Brussels alongside policy makers, museum directors and MEPs to address the divide between and within EU countries. After writing about cultural democracy I was invited to speak at the Labour Party’s The World Transformed festival. In 2016 I founded a resident led community organisation on the council estate where I live. With grant support this organisation has sought to strengthen community health, reduce social isolation and encourage civic participation by facilitating residents’ autonomy over their immediate environment. The creation of a community garden inspired a community cookbook, which was launched at Tate Modern alongside a panel discussion on food, heritage, memory and place. Other projects have included a self-build community hall project, and accompanying publication launched with a discussion at the V&A Museum. These projects have won awards, and been used as case studies on anti-racist approaches to urban regeneration.
After a period away from study these experiences and my research interests prompted me to undertake an MSc so that I could learn new ways of thinking.
