My main recent and ongoing projects include :

Spatialities of the subject

Emerging out of aspects of my PhD research, I am working on the development of understandings of the spatial logics inherent in many recent critical discussions of the subjectivity and intersubjective relations. As part of this, I am currently in the process of developing a book proposal that will entail an engagement with a range of (post)phenomenological work that addresses this topic. This is provisionally titled 'Encountering the Subject' and will discuss the spatial logics inherent in the conceptions of subjectivity presented in the writings of, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, Roberto Esposito and Michel Henry.


2018 - 2021: 'Living in cities with terror: effects of diffuse terrorism on urban atmospheres’. Funded by Initiative d'excellence Paris//Seine (Co-I, with Damien Masson (PI), Jean-Baptiste Frétigny (Co-I), Anne Herzog (Co-I), Cergy-Pointoise; Sara Fergonese (Co-I), Birmingham; and Simon Runkel (Co-I), Heidelberg) (€85,000) :

This project  aims to understand the 'weight' of the threat of terrorism upon city dwellers' daily experience of urban spaces in European metropolises. A first challenge of the project is to examine how this threat influences urban environments by acting on individuals, their behavior and their representations. The second issue, which is relevant to the first, concerns the understanding of the apparatus of urban security by considering the articulation of the discourses and practices of public and private actors and the feeling of security experienced by city dwellers. The central hypothesis of the project is that the urban environments have a capacity to translate this articulation and that a directed action on the atmospheres offers levers of action to increase the emotional resilience of the inhabitants of the cities in the contemporary context of diffuse terror.

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2011 - 2012: 'The Perception of the Cycling Environment: Infrastructures, Atmospheres, and the Experience of Sustainable Cycling'. Funded by the RGS-IBG Small Grant scheme (£2889):

Taking Plymouth as a case study, and drawing on interviews with key stakeholders in cycling planning and advocacy, the analysis of recent cycling policy and provision, and video-interviews with cyclists, this research seeks to develop understandings of cycling behaviour in two key ways. Firstly, much of the study of cycling, and particularly that related to the evaluation of policy provision, has been quantitative in nature. As such, this research takes a qualitative approach in studying cycling and the provisions made for it by examining the interrelation of cyclists and the planned environments they move through at an experiential level. Secondly, drawing on recent work related to non-representational theory and discussions of embodied practices, this research expands upon the small amount of existing research which has begun to examine the more general experience of cycling by focusing on the affective elements of this interrelation. As such, the research draws attention to the significance of the various atmospheres (both meteorological and felt) experienced by cyclists in their moving through the planned urban environment to the uptake of this practice.


2010 – 2014: ‘Sensory Enigmas of Contemporary Urban Mobilities’ Funded by L’Agence nationale de la recherché (French National Research Agency) (€210,000):

This research seeks to examine the ambiences and atmospheres produced in and through practices of travel in the context of key mobile sites. Taking St Pancras and Gare du Nord as case studies, the project examines the interrelation of security practices and surveillance, social interactions and embodied performances, and the general spatio-temporal patterning of these sites, and how in combination they produce a specific experience of travel. The project is international and interdisciplinary in scope, bringing together academics from geography, urban studies, architecture and sociology based in the UK, France, Brazil and Venezuela. Further, in addition to traditional academic outputs, the material produced through the project fieldwork will be developed into an artistic exhibition.