PhD Research Project: Architectures of asylum and refuge: reconfiguring hotels

From past conflicts and up to the recent refugee crisis, hotels have been used to host vulnerable populations such as internally displaced persons and refugees. Applicants are invited to submit PhD proposals exploring the role of and opportunities of hotels as spaces of emergency care and hospitality during conflict and emergency situations.

The applicant will have a background in geography, architecture, migration studies or cognate disciplines and will actively contribute to the School’s political geography element. The candidate will work under the supervision of Dr. Adam Ramadan and Dr Sara Fregonese and complement their research interests in refugees geographies and the socio-material dynamics of urban conflict. Fluency or advanced knowledge of one language besides English is desirable.

Applicants will have a background in Geography or cognate disciplines, strong political geography research interests and preferably training in social sciences methods and knowledge of socio-material research approaches. They will actively contribute to the School’s political geography element and will join the Human Geography Research Group at Birmingham, which has a large and vibrant cohort of doctoral students, as a member of the Geopolitics and the Carceral subtheme, led by Dr Sara Fregonese (http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/hg/index.aspx#ResearchAreas).
The student will work under Dr Adam Ramadan’s and Dr Sara Fregonese’s and supervision.

Dr Ramadan’s work lies at the intersection between political and cultural geography. It addresses the ‘everyday’ of geopolitics, how ordinary people understand and negotiate their position within broader geopolitical dynamics. Much of this work has focused on the Middle East, and in particular on refugee issues.

Dr Fregonese’s research lies in political and urban geography and studies the interplay between geopolitics, conflict and cities. Her expertise focus is on historical and contemporary conflict and urban life in Lebanon.
Dr Ramadan and Dr Fregonese’s research and publications have lately included hotels as sites of geopolitics, war- and peace-making (Fregonese, S. and Ramadan, A. 2015 “Hotel Geopolitics. A Research agenda” Geopolitics 20:4 (793-813)).