BA(Hons) Applied Theatre, The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts; MPhil Art, Creativity and Education, The University of Cambridge
Oliver is a second year PhD student. He works at the intersection of critical refugee studies, cultural anthropology and performance. At the centre of his research is an ethico-political question: what is our obligation to the stranger? More specifically, his research examines figurations of the displaced subject and the tensions of postcolonial belonging they raise. He attends to instances of contemporary migration within and from the Mashriq through the longue durée of European coloniality, muscular humanitarianism, Orientalism, Islamophobia and militarism in the region. Thinking against European modernity’s frame of illegality, capture and detention vis a vis the migrating body, he asks how imaginaries otherwise are put forth both on and off the stage. At Berkeley, he hopes to elaborate a performance anthropology of the displaced subject that attests to the struggle for, and possibility of, socialities otherwise.