Pursuing a PhD degree

Research Areas: Legal geography, economic geography, historical geography, critical cartography

Supervisors: Dr Priti Narayan and Dr Brenna Bhandar

Degrees:

• BSc in Government and History, London School of Economics (2020)
• MA in Geography, University of British Columbia (2025)

Entry date: 2025

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’?

To examine these questions, my doctoral project investigates gaps in the Land Registry of England and Wales. Title by registration is the infrastructure that underpins the modern property market, but is also an institutional form of memory that obscures untitled land users. I am interested in working with communities who continue to exercise customary (memories of) land practices, and can therefore offer a critical window into England’s political economy.

I am a member of the Museum of Enclosure collective based at House of Annetta in London, and I work as a research assistant to Dr Brenna Bhandar in the Allard School of Law.

From 2023 to 2024, I was full-time research assistant to Dr Samuel Burgum on the Narrow Margins project, investigating the effects of criminalisation of trespass and formalisation of property in England and Wales.

My MA thesis explored how contemporary land rights campaigns in England are constrained by land registration infrastructure. I argued the Right to Roam campaign, specifically its intentional acts of organised trespass, answers aspects of the English land question.

Across these projects, in public workshops, and in my daily life, I practice a form of critical cartography called mental sketch mapping. In 2024, the High Court of England and Wales cited evidence derived from mental sketch mapping interviews conducted with Gypsy and Traveller communities as part of the Narrow Margins project. Its judgment issued a declaration of incompatibility between new provisions introduced under the Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and Articles 8 and 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

I exercise a responsibility to engage in public scholarship and programming, particularly as my research concerns the decline of the English land question in public discourse. I also warmly welcome correspondence.