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Staff Profile

Dr Charlotte Veal

Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, Degree Programme Director Master of Landscape Architecture Studies

Background

Biography

My research focuses on the intersections between: (dancing) bodies, geopolitics and creative security; performance protest and the city (including site, space, place and landmarks); art, militarism and war; and develops the theories and practices of creative research methods. Through my research, I aim to demonstrate the value of the cultural and political geographies of performance and/or creativity and the role of political performances in spearheading novel responses to urban justice debates. I am particularly interested in bringing theories and practices of choreography and performance into conversation with emerging work on geopolitics, security, mobility and militarism. More recently, I have examined the cultural geographies of the micro, with a particular focus on the role of everyday practices (including infection prevention), visualisation and creative mapping techniques, and the languages and theories of governance, security and biopolitics.

 

Research Interests (overview)

- Landscape, embodiment and practice

- Geographies of creativity, performance and practice

- Borderscapes, intimate/everyday geopolitics and creative securities

- Arts and militarism 

- Aeolian landscapes and gravity (military parachuting to microbe)

- Interspecies and microbial geographies

- Geographies of infection prevention

- Experimental and creative methods

- Geohumanities


PhDs

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in any of the above areas.


Ongoing PhD Supervision:


2022- Anne-Sofie Billing: The More-than-Human Relations of Trans-planetary Imaginaries and Habitats (with Carmen McLeod and Martyn Dade-Robertson)


Masters Areas

  • Cultural landscapes (historically significant landscapes, cultural geography, heritage, representation)
  • Health and landscape (wellbeing, healthscapes and their politics)
  • Politics and landscape (e.g. justice, security, participatory, democracy, military, borders)
  • Artscapes (arts, multisensual, embodied, craft, performance and practice)
  • Seascape (coastal communities, entanglements, histories and futures, liminal spaces)
  • Multi-species relations (more-than-human, microbes, seaweed...)


Roles and Responsibilities

- I am a committee member of Newcastle University's Performance Research Network.

- I am a NUCoRE for Landscape Theme Lead - Adaptation

- I am the Early Career Representative for the APL Research Committee.

- APL Library Committee


External Roles and Responsibilities

- I am the RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Early Career and Mentoring Officer

- I am Book Review Editor for Cultural Geographies

- I am on the International Advisory Board for Landscape Research


Education

2016-2017: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, University of Southampton

2011-2015: PhD: Geography, University of Nottingham (no corrections)

2010-2011: MA: Landscape and Culture, University of Nottingham (Distinction)

2007-2010: BA: Geography, University of Nottingham (1st)

 

Previous Appointments

2019-2021: Postdoctorate Fellowship in Landscape, Newcastle University

2017-2018: Ass. Lecturer in Human Geography, Coventry University

2016-2017: Research Fellow in Human Geography, University of Southampton

2015-2017: Teaching Fellow in Human Geography, University of Southampton

 

Affiliations

Academic Member of the Landscape Institute

Fellow of Higher Education Academy

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society 

Member of the Landscape Research Group


Research

Current Research Project

Chorepolitics in the Borderland: Dance, Geopolitics and Spaces of Urban Securitisation - Fellowship in Landscape, Newcastle University (PI)

National borders are witnessing the unprecedented return of walls, fences, and separation barriers, as nation states across, and often between, the Global North and South seek new strategies of security in an era of geopolitical turbulence. Based upon a major piece of comparative interdisciplinary empirical research, spanning three continents, this project proposes an innovative geopolitical account of the role of performance in animating and contesting three urban securitised borderscapes; including on the US-Mexico border, West Bank Barrier and Thailand-Malaysia border.  Central to this project is a concern with dance as a geographical and political medium and the development of a critical embodied framework that responds to challenges of inter/national securitisation.

Routes of infection, routes to safety: Creative mapping of human-viral behaviours on the bus to understand infection prevention practices, AHRC COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant, with University of Southampton (Co-I)

There is an absence of qualitative, interdisciplinary research on the personal application of infection prevention (IP) measures, like hand-washing and mask-wearing, and its effectiveness beyond the healthcare setting. In this crisis, IP measures are critical to building confidence to resume leisure and economic activity out of the home. The project advances previous work by this team that identified a need for novel IP research which integrates behavioural, microbiological and aesthetic approaches to creatively demonstrate the interactions of human movement with microbial/viral transmission.  The case study is the public transport bus and its diverse community of users The research will: i) investigate the structural challenges in consistent application of IP in public (and private) spaces; ii) provide microbiological and sociological evidence to inform and improve effective cleaning practices for bus operators and safe travel practices for bus users; iii) generate wider public knowledge and understanding of infection risk/prevention and their geographies in shared indoor spaces.

Past Research Projects

Choreographing military bodies: Aeromobilities, embodied geopolitics, and dance-based combat training with the British Parachute Regiment - Royal Geographical Society Small Grant and the Jasmin Leila Award, University of Southampton (PI)


The archival project examines the micro-bodily regimes of British Parachute Regiment personnel during training at Ringway Aerodrome in the mid-1940s. It combines research into military- and aero-mobilities, with work on embodied geopolitics, and the emerging geographies of dance literature, to explore the making of the airborne militarised body. More specifically, the project analyses, innovatively, how military strategists solicited dance-based embodied knowledges in the furtherance of geopolitical agendas. Notably, it marshals interdisciplinary, multi-sensual archival sources to critically probe the historical role of dance theorist Rudolf Laban in the drilling and analysis of British paratrooper’s bodies during recruitment, as operationalised, and commencing assault operations. Here, I lay the foundations for examining dance-based pedagogy, including Laban’s ‘Industrial Rhythms’ and ‘Effort Analysis’, in cultivating ‘elite’ military bodies and ‘advance force’ practices. 


Preventing the spread of infection in a hospital setting: Health professionals, the agency of microbes & computer vision analysis and Fighting superbugs on the home front: becoming an ecological citizen in your bathroom - EPSRC via NAMRIP, University of Southampton (CI)


Throughout 2016, I was the lead social science post-doctorate on two transdisciplinary (engineering, nursing, microbiology, law and performance studies, EPSRC funded) projects. The former, on hand hygiene in the hospital ward examined how routine nursing practices are responses to the agency and representations of non-human microbial life, and in response, developed creative methodologies (simulated ultra-violet pathogens with photography) for attending to the practices, aesthetics and imaginaries of non-human-human microbial worlds. The latter developed and communicated new understandings about the infrastructures and behaviours of young families behaviour in relation to AMR in the home and bathroom environment. Through creative methodologies, including bathroom storytelling and microbial mask making, we evidenced the relationship between microbial threat and domestic cleaning practice and the multi-sensual factors driving human encounters with microbial worlds. Collectively, these projects advanced cultural geographies of the micro, and advocated for the role of geographical scholarship within the global fight against antimicrobial resistance. 


Choreographing urban resistance: Experimental dance performance into postcoloniality, wellbeing, and the right to the city - ESRC 1 3 Studentship and Universities21, University of Nottingham


My thesis is an interdisciplinary study about dance and the city. It is also about everyday life in the city as it has been shaped by postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and practices of securing the urban. It achieves this by exploring three cities; London (with Addis Ababa), Vancouver, and Cape Town. The research critically examines how performance can animate the urban and cultivate strategies of resistance within the city. I introduce the dancing body and notions of performance as objects of study, and more unusually, as the means for doing research. Through the language and practices of performance, and by means of the dancing body, I work within a diverse geographical literature to examine the relationship between mobile bodies and urban spaces. My thesis therefore advances a corporeal and creative approach to researching the city. This includes the historical geographies of colonialism (on postcolonial performativities), research within economic geography on the creative heath-seeking subject, and urban scholarship concerned with socio-spatial securitisation, exclusions and resistance.

Teaching

I am the Degree Programme Director for MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management (2023-) and former Programme Director for MA Landscape Architecture Studies (MALAS) programme (2022-23).


Current Teaching

I currently teach on the Landscape Architecture (MLA) and Landscape Architecture Studies (MALAS) programmes. This includes:

APL8015: Introduction to Landscape Research: Skills and Practice (module leader)

APL8000/APL8004: Conceptualising Landscape (module leader)

APL8008: Landscape Histories and Theories (module leader)

APL8007: Design Thesis (module leader)

APL8006: Landscape Architecture Studio 2

Past Teaching

I have taught widely in cultural and political landscape / geographies, qualitative methods and fieldwork research, and supervised undergraduate and masters dissertations, in previous roles at the University of Southampton and Coventry University. This includes:

- Experimental Geographies  (module leader)

- People and Place

- Society and Space (module leader)

- Sex Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

- Cultural Geographies

- Practicing Human Geographical Research

- Field Techniques and Skills

- Project Preparation for Human Geography, CU (module leader)

Other

I hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Publications