Key hypothesis: the development and decline of the RUSI Museum articulates a particular, semi-authorised reading of British imperial history from the late eighteenth century to the empire's dissolution in the 1960s. The RUSI Museum, 1831-1962, is a 'lost' museum with collections that have left their 'ghostly' presence across national and international museums and private collections. It survives as an archival record, or shadow, in the heritage and legacy of RUSI. My key approach, as outlined above, is to interrogate my hypothesis that the development and decline of the RUSI Museum reflects British imperial history from the late eighteenth century to the dissolution of empire as British colonies demanded their independence. This hypothesis has been formed through my curatorial practice at RUSI and my research in the RUSI archives. This began with the presentation of papers on the Institute's history, and its collections, for the Library and Information History Group and the Museum and Galleries History Group conferences of 2018. The interested responses from other participants at these conferences, along with the regular influx of enquiries I receive about objects that were held in the museum, demonstrates an ongoing interest in the history of the 'lost' museum. It has almost mythic status, so that citing it in an object's provenance in a sales catalogue adds significant cultural, if not financial, value.

Xenofeminism-A Politics for Alienation (XF) is a text written in 2015 by the working group Laboria Cuboniks of which I am a founding member. It develops a feminism that embraces reason, technology and complexity, and claims alienation as a productive force and 'an impetus to generate new worlds'. The manifesto is my point of departure for this PhD research proposal. The project will develop the idea of a Xenotemporality which is implicit in the XF text but needs rigorous elaboration. To do this I will articulate what is meant by alienation in the manifesto and how it can be productive. I will go on to argue why alienation in relation to the question of 'time' can be vital for constructing adequate conceptual tools for thinking about the anthropocene. Xeotemoporality (XT) is based on the idea that the human experience of time has historically guided our conception of it but that this anthropogenic conception of time is too parochial for our current needs. The primacy of human phenomenological experience of time is no longer sufficient for how we organise, inflect and orient the systems we have created because these systems function on scales beyond the experiential capacity of the human. GPS satellites and High Frequency Trading provide two examples. These conditions establish a need for a rethinking of time, demoting our experiential understanding of it and removing ourselves as primary measures of its ontology. XT endorses instead a necessary and productive alienation between our experience and our knowledge that broadens how we think about the very idea of 'the future' and how we might go about constructing it. This is the conceptual work I am proposing with this project. It will be executed through both written dissertation and studio practice. I am proposing practice based PHD research. It will be conducted as an art practice and make clear and distinctive interdisciplinary connections between philosophy, science and design. The outcomes will be two video works and a series of drawings and a written text elaborating the theoretical developments of the research.

In my doctoral research, I will investigate the connection between folk dancing and ethnolinguistic identity in diasporic communities, exploring how engaging with the intangible cultural heritage of dance may be found to compensate for the gradual loss of heritage languages as observed in diasporas. My research will focus on the UK's Greek Cypriot community. Though the goal of Greek Cypriot families is for their children to learn Greek as a heritage language, including the Cypriot Greek dialect, in order to enable communication with older members of the families and preserve cultural and ethnic identity, the difficulties younger members of the community face in learning the two varieties drives them to explore and construct their identity through other forms of cultural expression. An example of this is folk dancing, which is taught in several organised groups. I will explore how folk dancing is utilised as a strategy to overcome the difficulty of conquering Greek as the community's heritage language so that participants can negotiate their diasporic belonging and feel that they are members of their 'imagined community'. I will also explore how the traditions related to folk dancing have evolved within the Greek Cypriot diaspora in London, ideologies around and attitudes towards dances, and how they pertain to the identity of the Greek Cypriot community living in London.

Global Photographies is an emerging network of educational institutions and professional organisations dedicated to expanding transnational discourse in contemporary photography. Founded by academics at five UK Universities (University of Westminster, UAL, Falmouth University, Leeds University and UCL) it aims to produce a more complex picture of how photography is explored internationally. Although launched in the UK to address colonial histories, it proposes a network of equal global collaborators, inside and outside education. Through a programme of talks, seminars, workshops and associated publications and digital outputs, it offers a horizontal platform for the presentation, discussion and dissemination of ideas around photography and its distinct local photographic cultures. The network will contribute to the decolonizing of Western perception and of photography teaching globally. The emergence of Covid-19 led the network's founding members to programme online talks, funded through existing academic budgets, to connect photography practitioners, academics and professionals worldwide. A pilot of six monthly talks, each hosted from a different country, launched in November 2020. The first, by Mexico-based photographer, curator and mentor Ana Casas Broda (accessed by 220 users in 14 countries), demonstrated the need for such content to be shared. Our activities over the past few months have attracted core international collaborators in Argentina, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore and South Africa, with access to the network's programme to be shared with future collaborators. The aim is to create new, far-reaching global connections so as to compare experience of photographic practices, contexts, theories and markets. Collaborators have expressed a desire to learn more about the work of their peers internationally: a speaker from India described the series as offering a sense of "global solidarity" among those from more marginalized cultures. UK and international collaborators want to go beyond the limited encounters provided by one-off talks or conferences to develop more substantial, collaborative debates within the structure of a more extended project. UK collaborators have secured internal funding to continue the public online talks by international speakers. The proposal builds upon this base to provide activities for core collaborators that could not happen without additional funding. For 12 months, each talk will be followed by an online seminar, led by a speaker from that month's location, to discuss ideas and challenges raised in that talk or context. The discussion will be deepened by 4 online methodology workshops, spread across the year and led by international photographic scholars with a focus on transnational, cross-disciplinary and intersectional approaches. This research will feed the photographic practices of many of the participants, their teaching and textual scholarship. The seminars and workshops will be written up and responded to by collaborators across the network, producing a cumulative dialogue that can be accessed via a website, with selections developed for submission to academic journals that specialise in photography, and also to non-academic publications and websites in the context of partner countries where academic discourse is less accessible. As the activities of the network are collaboratively produced and shared with a global network of collaborators over the course of 18 months, their impact will be cumulative. The primary stakeholders who give talks and participate in seminars and workshops will share findings with secondary stakeholders: students, emerging photographers and general audiences. The programme will give participants access to a broader range of discourses, which in turn offer improved access to international institutions and markets. The programme of activities is intended to lead to further collaborations, publications and research applications

Access to green spaces has been shown to promote physical and mental health (WHO, 2016). This, combined with the cultural heritage of gardens, means that these are valuable places that everyone should be able to access and enjoy. This is supported by the Equality Act (2010), which states that service providers, such as a garden or museum, have a duty to make reasonable adjustments in order to provide access to that service. For blind or partially sighted (BPS) people, audio description (AD) is a way of facilitating access to film, TV, theatre, museums, and galleries. AD is a 'verbal commentary, providing visual information for those unable to perceive it themselves' (Fryer, 2016: 1), helping people to build a mental picture of a film, play or exhibition. Screen AD is fully professionalised (Fryer, 2016), with comprehensive research and guidelines for describers. However, museum AD is at a comparatively early stage of development (Hutchinson and Eardley, 2019), and garden AD is arguably at an even earlier stage. Both are based on limited guidelines (such as RNIB, 2010 and ADLAB, 2014), but more research has been undertaken in relation to AD in the museum context. This study will benefit from the extensive research into screen AD, as well as the limited research in museum AD. Whilst there have been some successful examples of audio described gardens, including a multi-sensory audio-described tour at the Chelsea Physic Garden (Audio Description Association, 2014), access to audio described gardens is varied, with little guidance or research to inform what approach should be taken. This means that for the estimated two million people in UK living with sight loss (RNIB, 2019), access services at gardens are limited. So, while further research is required to understand how best to provide access to gardens, there is also an opportunity to consider how access to gardens can be inclusive, rather than providing a separate service for the BPS audience.