Reconstruction at a Distance

Cities destroyed by war are increasingly rebuilt under the eyes of people who cannot return to them. From Mosul to Aleppo, Gaza and Mariupol, decisions about what is restored — and what is erased — are taken while much of each city's population lives in displacement, following the works of reconstruction on screens, in group chats, and through relatives' photographs. Recent scholarship on Mosul has shown how reconstruction can prioritise internationally legible monuments over the everyday urban fabric in which collective memory resides (Al-Daffaie and Abdelmonem, 2023; Isakhan and Meskell, 2024; Larkin and Rudolf, 2024). What it has not yet asked is how the displaced themselves map, contest, and transmit the memory of destroyed home cities — and whether such maps can count as knowledge within reconstruction. 

This project invites a candidate to develop counter-mapping — participatory, memory-led mapping that sets residents' knowledge against official cartographies — as a method for working with diaspora communities in the UK (Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, Ukrainian, or others, subject to the candidate's interests and access). Questions might include: whose memory is mobilised when a city is rebuilt at a distance; how diasporic memory differs from that of remaining residents; and by what routes diasporic knowledge can enter reconstruction. Methods might combine counter-mapping and oral history with digital ethnography. Candidates are encouraged to reshape these questions as independent researchers.