Pursuing a PhD in Geography

Research Areas: Geographical political economy, critical cartography, historical geography, legal geography

Supervisor: Trevor Barnes and Priti Narayan

Entry Date: 2024

Research Statement:

I research the memory culture related to historic and ongoing dispossession in England. How has the English land question, understood as issues around land use, ownership, access and rights, changed over time? How is dispossession remembered in England, where it is known (and more importantly unknown) as ‘enclosure’?

In my PhD, I am investigating the relationship between institutional and customary memory of enclosures by focusing on the ‘development’ of land registration infrastructure and laws of trespass across the British Isles and British Empire.

This research is motivated by my concern for people and lands affected by ongoing colonial dispossession, resource extraction, and concentrated land ownership across space and time. These processes are unevenly applied, experienced, and remembered: for instance, my questions have become more salient to me while researching on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory. Given its significance in everyday life and, I argue, for studies of racial capitalism, the English land question is understudied, especially in comparison to neighbouring nations in the British Isles and other contexts of dispossession.

In my MA thesis, I explored how the Right to Roam campaign answers the English land question since 2020. In 2023-2024, I was a postdoctoral research assistant (PDRA) to Dr Samuel Burgum on the Narrow Margins project, a genealogical approach to the criminalisation of trespass and formalisation of property in England and Wales. I am a member of the Museum of Enclosure collective based at House of Annetta in London.

Across these projects, in public workshops, and in my daily life, I use mental sketch mapping, a critical cartographic method and psychoanalytic practice. I also map every trespass sign I encounter.  I have a responsibility to engage in public scholarship and programming, particularly as my research concerns the decline of the English land question. I also welcome correspondence.

Publications and interviews

Doherty, Mike (2024) The Section 60 police powers to evict Traveller roadside camps — two years on. Travellers’ Times, September 12 2024
Pojuner, Isabella and Burgum, Samuel (2024) The Narrow Margins of Finsbury Park. A People’s History of Finsbury Park, Museum of Homelessness

Pojuner, Isabella (2023) After the flood, they mapped land ownership. Monitor Magazine, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Mertins-Kirkwood, Hadrian, Cohen, Max, Pojuner, Isabella, and Lewis, Avi (2023) Don’t Wait for the State: A blueprint for grassroots climate transitions in Canada, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.