)
Border Stories: Geographies of Vulnerability in the Anthropocene
Supervisor: Jos Smith (LDC)
Iona Macduff is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar at University of East Anglia on the Critical Decade for Climate Change programme. Based in the school of Literature, Drama and Creative writing, Iona’s PhD will use theory and practice from human geography to inform and inspire her writing of a work of creative non-fiction. To this end, throughout her PhD she will be carrying out research in a number of borderland locations, asking searching questions around living and belonging, migration, and the more-than-human world, to probe what response-able, radical home-making and refuge could be in the context of the Anthropocene.
Iona has an academic background in Social Anthropology with South Asian Studies (MA Hons, Edinburgh University) and Social Anthropology of Development (MA, SOAS). Student activism led on to her work as a human rights researcher and advocacy specialist, most often focused on the situation in Tibet and for Tibetan refugees in South Asia. She has lived in South Asia (predominantly Nepal) for over a decade, and the Himalayan region will be a locus for her PhD research and writing.
What are you most excited about in joining the Critical Decade PhD programme?
I am really excited by the depth and breadth of not only my own project, but the interdisciplinary range of the others’ too, for the conversations, ideas, shifts in thinking, and synergies that these might spark. Though a small group, we seem symbolically representative of the wider academic communities working on these issues in various disciplines. Will we connect and co-create? What will that look like? What will we all learn from this being-in-community?
In terms of my own project, I am thrilled to be able to bring together my past experiences and love of writing in the service of a project that looks at boundaries in order to push boundaries around how we might survive the Anthropocene. I am excited to see what that will look like both academically and literarily, and where it will take me as a writer.