Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Mohamad Hafeda
Dr Mohamad Hafeda awarded £100,000 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 Visual and Performing Arts. The award will support his practice-led research into socially engaged participatory art. Dr Hafeda’s work focuses on site-specific, practice-led research methods that are culturally and politically specific to urban spaces.
Through his research, Dr Hafeda engages with people and communities to realise counter representations and spatial alternatives; producing urban interventions, art installations and writings. In Dr Hafeda’s latest project, ‘Negotiating the Temporality of Borders and Displacements’, he is investigating 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.
Using a range of creative methodologies, his research reflects on the experience of displaced communities and refugees in the Middle East and the UK, through recording the temporal bordering practices they may encounter day-to-day and how they seek to resist these temporal bordering mechanisms. Dr Hafeda contextualises these issues through an exploration of related government policies in countries receiving refugees and the histories and geographies of displacements.
The Philip Leverhulme Prizes have been awarded annually in recognition of exceptional early career researchers whose work has already attracted significant international recognition. The £100,000 prize supports award-winners to pursue and promote further ambitious research projects. After winning the prize, Dr Mohamad Hafeda 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.”
