Isla Zavos-MacRae

Working Thesis Title: Mapping Everyday Multiculture and Imagining Space “Otherwise” in a Northern Mill Town. 

Isla’s research explores the ways in which everyday multicultural space is lived, experienced and produced within a particular, post-industrial geography. It does so by critically mapping the ways in which space is practised and imagined “otherwise” amongst different migrant and ethnic minority communities living in a former textile town in northern England. By exploring these everyday vernacular geographies, Isla’s research highlights the experiential qualities and role of place for the construction and reconstruction of identities, as well as the ways in which everyday negotiations of difference manifest and are experienced at the micro-social scale. Using walking methods and practices of critical cartography, this project aims to provide new insights into the politics of contemporary co-existence, whilst shifting analytical attention towards the layers of migration which have come to make up the ‘post-industrial town’. 

Research Interests: 

• Critical Cartography

• Walking and Sensory Methods

• Lived Multiculture and Conviviality

• Everyday Life

• Place, Space and Belonging

• Embodiment and Affect

• Northern Towns and Brexit