directors
Barbara Brayshay
Barbara Brayshay is a Researcher in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London working on the AHRC-funded project The Oral History of the Environmental Movement in the UK 1970-2020 (OHEM). She has a PhD in Bioarcheology and Environmental Change and over 15 years research experience in community informatics and community development research, focusing on participatory mapping as a tool for community engagement and consultation. Her research ethos is grounded in Participatory Action Research (PAR) principles and practice. Aims include mobilizing and empowering communities to have a say in identifying and solving their problems, advocating for the inclusion of grassroots stakeholder experience in developing policy interventions, and attempting to correct power imbalances in knowledge and information flows. Barbara is the editor for the Waypoints section of Living Maps Review.
Toby Butler
Dr Toby Butler is a heritage consultant and public historian with a particular interest in oral history, digital heritage, and mapping memories. For six years Toby led an innovative MA programme in Heritage Studies: place, memory and history at the Raphael Samuel History Centre. Toby is known internationally for his work exploring how history and memory can be mapped and used to interpret places and their pasts. Projects include Ports of Call, working with community groups and artists around the docks of East London to map and historically interpret the area; the Bethnal Green Disaster Memorial Project and Groundbreakers, mapping and interpreting the pre-Olympic history of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. Toby is currently a reader in historical geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is leading a major AHRC funded research project on the oral history of the environmental movement. He is also a digital education consultant at Birkbeck, University of London where he recently worked on the Mapping Museums project, to create an online database and map of all the museums in the UK from 1960-present featuring his interviews with 57 museum founders and he co-ordinated a project to set up a regional support network for aviation museums. Email: toby.butler@rhul.ac.uk
Mike Duggan
Mike works in the Digital Humanities Department at King's College London. He holds a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, working in partnership with the Ordnance Survey on studying everyday digital mapping practices. His research is primarily interested in the tensions and contradictions that emerge when we examine how digital society and technology is theorised alongside how everyday life is lived. This has manifested in research about digital mapping practices, counter and radical cartography, and the lived experiences of the sharing economy
Email: michael.duggan@kcl.ac.uk
Jina Lee
Is a PhD student at the University of Arts, London. Her artwork and research are about the collapse of territorial boundaries between social, political and geographical space, elements which are in a state of increasing fluidity and movement of emigration. Jina’s observations and findings, made through various modes of drawing, open the possibility for unsuspected interactions of experience and knowledge in relation to geopolitical and cultural boundary issues.
Heather Miles
Is a PhD student in human geography at the University of Manchester. Heather's research interests are the relationship between mapping and contrasting forms of knowledge and data; the interlacing of digital and hand-done processes in the making and use of maps; the relationship between mapping and the discipline of geography; and transdisciplinarity. For her PhD she is exploring the use of contrasting practices of mapping together - geospatial, narrative-based and embodied mapping - as an approach to transdisciplinarity.
You can find materials for map-making research produced by Heather in our Resources section.
Advisory Group
Phil Cohen
Is Editor-at-large of Livingmaps Review.
He is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London. Phil started using mapping methods in working with young people in East London about their sense of place, identity and belonging.
His publications include Knuckle Sandwich: Growing up in the Working Class City (1978), Rethinking the Youth Question (1990), London’s Turning: the making of Thames Gateway (2006), On the Wrong Side of the Track: East London and the Post-Olympics (2013), London 2012 and the Post Olympic City (2017) and Archive That, Comrade: Left Legacies and the counter culture of remembrance (2018).
Further information:
www.philcohenworks.com
Blake Morris
Blake is a walking artist, independent scholar and research impact specialist based in New York City. His artistic work and scholarly research focus on inviting people to walk together, often at a distance through the use of digital tools. Projects have included British Summer Time, an ongoing series of global sunrise walks and the Arts Council England funded project This is not a Slog, for which he created three site-specific walks for Ovalhouse Theatre (London). His recent book, Walking Networks: The Development of an Artistic Medium (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020) offers an overview of the current field of walking art in the United Kingdom and a definition for the medium. His writing can also be found in journals such as Green Letters: Studies in Eco-Criticism, the International Journal of Tourism Cities, and Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann s Ways to Wander publications (Axminster: Triarchy Press).
kimbal Quist Bumstead
Kimbal’s art practice stems from his background in participatory performance art and his fascination with maps. His work explores notions of the imagined and re-imagined landscape, abstraction as a form of storytelling, and mark-making as a tool to tune-in to sensory, emotional and embodied experiences. He uses a broad range of media, from painting and drawing to video, performance and site-specific installation.
Kimbal facilitates workshops, participatory drawing projects and runs art classes for adult education. He has worked with various community groups and grassroots organisations across London, including Camberwell Arts, Lewisham People’s Day and Livingmaps Network, and run creative outreach workshops for the Royal Docks Team. He has exhibited and performed internationally. He has written about his practice in journals and his writing ‘Unmapping Space: Lines, Smudges and Stories’ has recently been published in the book New Directions in Radical Cartography (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)
Clare Qualmann
Is an artist/researcher with an interdisciplinary performance oriented practice. From a background in the visual arts her work engages a range of participatory methods, and a range of media to explore the politics and potentials of everyday life. From 2012 - 2015 she led an AHRC funded project to develop the Walking Artists Network, an international online directory for the use of walking in creative practice. Her own projects use walking as process, method and outcome for instigating and investigating exchanges between people and places. Recent commissions include walkwalkwalk: stories from the Bethnal Green archive (2010) a permanent installation of architectural text-works in Bethnal Green Old Town Hall.
Jacob Wallett
Jacob Wallett is an artist from London based in The Netherlands. He is currently studying in the ArtScience department at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (KABK) in The Hague. He has Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in chemistry from University College London (UCL).
Giada Peterle
Is a Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Padua with a project entitled Urban Literary Geographies: Mapping the city through narrative interpretation and creative practice.
Kremena Dimitrova
Kremena is a London based illustrator-as-historian, storyteller, lecturer in Visual Culture, and practice-based PhD researcher in Visualising History at the University of Portsmouth. She specialises in children's illustration, comics, murals, public art installations, maps/trails, and visual storytelling in the cultural, heritage, and education sectors. Kremena often works with archives and collections and uses a mixture of artistic approaches, such as interweaving text and images, creative writing, mapmaking, character development, and humour to bring untold, hidden, forgotten, and marginalised narratives to life. She experiments with photographic material and traditionally made textures, patterns, painted, drawn, and printed backgrounds, which she often combines into digital collages. Kremena has had a number of diverse national and international exhibitions and her work features in print, online, book publishing, design, and advertising. Many of Kremena's commissions are socially engaged and site-specific in nature and involve collaborating with the public to explore culture, history, and heritage in creative, interdisciplinary, and memorable ways - through art, storytelling, and co-creation.
Sana Murrani
Dr Sana Murrani is an Associate Professor in Spatial Practice with a background in Architecture and Urban Design. She is the Arts/Health Research Lead and the founder of the Displacement Studies Research Network and the co-founder of the Justice and Imagination in Global Displacement Research Collective at the University of Plymouth and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. Sana’s research interests are rooted in (un)disciplined interdisciplinarity of spatial justice, informed by a creative, place-based research practice focused on built, destroyed, and imagined geographies of war, violence and displacement in the Middle East (with a focus on Iraq).
project associates
Atif Mohammed Ghani
Is Director-Producer at Heritage 5G LTD, and Producer with HyperActive Developments Ltd. He is interested in youth engagement and in creating immersive digital learning tools for young people.