Our research explores how life, wellness and vitality is constituted through human-environment relations and is driven by decolonising imperatives.
We are invested in tracing the production and differential material exposures to environments that constrain vitality and we are committed to exploring how reparative approaches can unveil the enduring legacies of colonialism in healthcare and medicine. Through collaborative efforts, we aim to address and ameliorate exclusions and inequalities in the provision of healthcare within the UK as well as critically interrogating those enacted under the logics of global health.
Through the Planetary Portals collective, Kerry Holden conducts archival research on extractive industries in South Africa to think through the colonial afterlives that continue to shape contemporary life, value systems and equity across geographies that stretch from east London to the Southern Africa. She explores the organisation of bodies in mining communities, and how the value of life and death was organised along racist lines that set in motion the necropolitics of the Apartheid regime that remain in the toxic environments and limited access to healthcare affecting South Africa’s Black and indigenous communities. Kerry’s collaboration with Environmental Humanities South (EHS) at the University of Cape Town builds on the Portals project to address the toxic legacies of colonialism in developing reparative epistemologies for more sustainable and healthy environments.
Tim Brown’s interdisciplinary and collaborative research into the socio-environmental conditions that combine to disrupt children’s recovery from severe acute malnutrition is a prominent example of our work in this area. In projects focused on Zimbabwe but extending across the the southern African region and into the UK, Tim seeks to situate the embodied practices of caring in an intersectional framework that accounts for the powerful influences of gender and mobility as well as those emanating from the region’s colonial past as well as its post-colonial present. This use of an intersectionality approach is also reflected in Rita Sharma Pandeya’s LISS DTP funded doctoral research that considers the uneven impacts of flood disasters on human health and societal well-being in Nepal. Although focused on critically interrogating the (im)possibilities of caring in crisis, Tim’s and Rita’s research reflects the research theme's concern for developing reparative approaches through the critical evaluation of interventions and practices that build on indigenous knowledge systems and south-south praxis.
A little closer to home, Ed Kiely’s Leverhulme Trust-funded research into involuntary psychiatric detention interrogates the relations between racialisation, urban securitisation and (mental) healthcare. This stems from the fact that racialised people, in particular Black people, are disproportionately likely to be detained compared to white people. By investigating the state agents who oversee the detention process, the project aims to expose the institutional dynamics which contribute to racial biases in detention rates. Working across the contrasting postcolonial contexts of the UK and the Netherlands, this research examines the enrolment of healthcare knowledges and practices in violent processes of racialisation. Similarly, Elizabeth Storer’s collaborative research (with Dr Nikita Simpson, SOAS and Dr Suad Duale) explores how invasive mould which renders inner-city UK homes pathogenic, simultaneously provides material proof through which minoritized communities can organise against dispossession.