Another Provision, my collaborative practice with Amsterdam-based artist Johann Arens has been awarded  the Marsh Awards for Excellence in Visual Arts Engagement in March. The award, which celebrates innovation in visual arts and education contexts, is awarded annually by the Marsh Charitable Trust and Engage, a leading charity on arts engagement.

At the end of 2024, I recorded a couple of podcasts.

The first was a roundtable discussion of a new book, Infrastructural Times, on the Urban Political podcast (generally a great resource, if you don’t already know it!).

The second was a discussion with UCL colleagues on The Bartlett Review about how the built environment can contribute to safer cities for women and gender diverse people. We spoke in particular about the role of community-based research.

Together with Johann Arens, I have received UCL East’s Engagement Award for Excellence in Co-Creation for our project ‘Another Provision’.

Find more information about the other nominees here.

The women's safety audits for Transport for London and the Mayor of London's Office for Policing and Crime were completed over the summer. We shared some initial findings at UCL in October.

The formal conclusion of the project takes place on 3 December at the Whitechapel Gallery, with the wonderful Caroline Criado-Perez chairing the panel.

Book tickets via Eventbrite.

Johann Arens and I have published a reflection on our collaborative practice over the past four years in the ‘Practice and Curations’ section of the journal GeoHumanities - please find it here (open access).

Our exhibition 'Municipal Kitchens' at nGbK in Berlin has been a lot of fun - and a real success in terms of bringing new audiences into arts spaces, and initiating conversations between disparate groups about how to make food a public service in cities.

The exhibition has received a bit of media attention - see some reviews (in German) in Tagesspiegel, rbb info radio, and Art in Berlin.

Earlier this year, my chapter Representing infrastructural violence: artistic engagements with Lebanon’s waste crisis was published in the Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities edited by Olivier Coutard and Daniel Florentin.

Through the work of three Lebanese artists’ work on waste, I consider the ways that infrastructural violence operates and which are often not captured in traditional (social) science approaches.

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.

The exhibition and event programme, Municipal Kitchens, will run from 28 June until 18 August 2024 at nGbK in Berlin.

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

Join us for the opening event and meal on Friday, 28 June, 7pm. Come early to avoid a long wait. Register if you'd like to be part of the food preparations.

I’m spending this June and July as a resident at the Centre for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin.

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.

My project will build on my work with Another Provision and Municipal Kitchens, to think about food circulations and infrastructures in the city.

I received funding from UCL and Camden Council for a project with Madeleine Kessler, Co-curator of the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. We will be working with asylum seekers living in Camden in central London to co-design a community food space for them to cook, share meals, and socialise with longer-term residents.

This is a pilot project responding to the urgent food access needs outlined in research by the food charity Sustain. The shocking findings about the abysmal food conditions in London asylum hostels were also covered in the Guardian.

Once inaugurated, the space will be taken over by Camden and the Somers Town Community Association for regular food events for asylum seekers. We hope it will serve as an example of an innovative policy initiative for making refugees more welcome at the local level.

I will be speaking at UCL's Anthropology department as part of a series of seminars on Palestine in a session focusing on the politics of infrastructure on 12 March.

The Speaker Sessions are a student initiative aimed at creating a safe space for discussion and learning about different perspectives surrounding themes of internal politics, finance, security, foreign policy and infrastructure in relation to Palestine and Israel.

My contribution will focus on infrastructural disconnect and destruction in Gaza over the past six months, in particular the war crime of cutting off power and drinking water supply to civilian populations.

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 in an interview Sadiq Khan gave to Harper's Bazaar and in this episode of the Urbanist podcast.

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 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 on 29 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.

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.

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.