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Dr Mohamad Hafeda awarded prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize
Dr Mohamad Hafeda, Reader at Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University, has been awarded a £100,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work on socially engaged participatory art.
His work focuses on site-specific, practice-led research methods that are culturally and politically specific to urban spaces, receiving the award in the Visual and Performing Arts category.
Dr Hafeda engages with people and communities to produce counter representations and spatial alternatives that create urban interventions, art installations and writings.
Dr Hafeda’s most recent project, Negotiating the Temporality of Borders and Displacements, investigates the temporality of bordering and displacement, exploring how time is mechanised to control space and movement of displaced communities in urban contexts in Lebanon and the UK.
Employing varying artistic interventions, his research reflects on displaced communities and refugees in the Middle East and the UK through recording the temporal bordering practices they encounter on a daily basis and their methods of resistance to border mechanisms. This is explored in relation to government policies in receiving countries and histories and geographies of displacements.
Dr Hafeda is also founding partner of Febrik, a collaborative platform for participatory art and design research working on the dynamics of urban space in relation to unrepresented groups.
The Philip Leverhulme Prizes have been awarded annually since 2001 and recognise researchers at an early stage of their career, whose work has already attracted significant international recognition, and whose future research career is exceptionally promising. Prize winners receive an award of £100,000 to be used to promote further research.
Dr Mohamad Hafeda, Reader at Leeds Schools of Arts at Leeds Beckett University, said:“I am delighted to win the Philip Leverhulme Prize. It is much needed support to academics at a precarious time and an acknowledgment of the importance of practice-led research and socially engaged art in producing knowledge, regarding the experiences, representation, and rights of marginalised subjects.
‘’The prize will give me the opportunity to develop my current research on the temporality of bordering in the context of migration, and to engage with communities and organisations in negotiating constraints of refuge, while constructing counter representations and spatial alternatives.”
Each year, up to 30 UK university researchers from different academic disciplines are selected to receive a Philip Leverhulme Prize. The disciplines change annually and in 2021 nominations for prizes included: Classics; Earth Sciences; Physics; Politics and International Relations; Psychology; Visual and Performing Arts.