Charlotte Durham

Profile

I am a PhD student based in the School of Media and Communication and funded by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures.

My research aims to bring together a range of approaches in order to explore the conditions of possibility for the embodied subject by configuring and reconfiguring bodies and space in iterative ways when thinking about Disney, and that this will direct attention to the politics of an everyday, hypermediated environment. In doing so, I ask the question ‘to what extent are bodies, forged as they are though the conditions of an everyday hypermediated environment, enmeshed with affective, data-driven fabrics of socio-cultural and socio-technical systems?’. Within this project I reflect on a set of conceptual issues around the physical embodied and virtual disembodied; affect, subjectivity, and biopower; and digital, data-driven and datalogical systems, alongside a further set of onto-epistemological issues around the inseparability of intra-acting agencies and how knowledge or Truth is claimed, constructed, presented, and articulated.

Alongside my work as a postgraduate researcher, I am treasurer of the Disney, Culture and Society Research Network, an international and interdisciplinary space for Disney Studies scholars. Additionally, I also work with the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Cultures as an Enhancement Advisor on projects such as the Leeds Excellence in Arts Programme and the Undergraduate Research Experience.

Research interests

• Affect
• Biopower and Biopolitics
• Creative/Experimental Research Methods/Design
• Embodiment and Everyday Life
• Digital and Datalogical Systems
• Disney 
• Feminist Theory
• Phenomenological Geography

Qualifications

• BA (Hons) Communication and Media (First Class), University of Leeds – 2021
• MA Communication and Media (Distinction), University of Leeds – 2022