The invited speakers are Olivia Sheringham and Janetka Platun (Queen Mary, University of London).

This seminar will discuss the relationships between urban dwelling, migration and mobility with a particular focus on creative practice and collaborations beyond the academy. The discussion will comprise of two key strands: (i) an exploration of new ways of conceptualising – and capturing – the dynamic interplay between home, migration and the city; and (ii) a discussion of the possibilities of creative practice collaboration with artists for critically engaging with these themes.

The speakers will draw on examples from Olivia Sheringham’s current research project, Home-City- Street (with Alison Blunt and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard) which has involved public engagement events, artist-led workshops, and the creation of visual and testimonial ‘home-city biographies’ (including four short films) with local residents of a street in East London. They will also discuss on-going collaboration on Janetka Platun’s project, Globe. Globe is a filmic and sculptural artwork which takes the form of a copper coated spherical structure (a globe) containing four small cameras that we have rolled around the streets of East London (and elsewhere) having street-based conversations with people about what home means in contexts shaped by connections with people and places from other parts of the globe. These have been edited alongside the tumbling images from Globe’s revolving footage of the urban topography into a film entitled Here Be Dragons (Platun, 2017). The seminar will reflect on these projects in relation to wider research on home, migration and the city and consider the opportunities and challenges of creative and collaborative practice for developing new understandings of home, city and their relationships with the wider world.

Janetka Platun is an installation artist. The street is often her studio. The themes that run through her art are our collective search for belonging, transient concepts of home and how we deal with loss. Globe provides new perspectives and approaches to themes, which are central to her work.

Olivia Sheringham is a lecturer in Cultural Geography with a broad interest in relationships between identity, space and power in the context of transnational migration and diaspora. Her work has focused on place-making and integration, migration and religion, creolization and identity formation, and geographies of home and the city. Her interest in Globe forms part of her ongoing interest in the possibilities of collaboration between geographers and artists for both theory and practice.