Close
Tom Western is a writer, researcher, and artist. He is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography, having joined UCL in 2020. His work builds creative geographies that seek to imagine futures beyond the colonial past and present. Tom works primarily in Athens, where he’s involved in various forms of creative and collaborative research and movement building.
- More about Dr Western
I am currently finishing my first book – titled Circular Movements – about Athens and the Mediterranean, written in circles and circulations, gathering imaginations of the city and the sea, and mapping ways out of the linear histories and geographies of empire.
I have recently published work in Society and Space, The Journal of Creative Geography, and Migration and Society (see publications below for details). I am co-editor (with Prof Tariq Jazeel) of a special issue of Social Text, titled “Sound Carries”, forthcoming in 2024.
With a background as a musician, much of my work centres on sound and music, and in Athens, I co-run the Citizen Sound Archive – a space for amplifying youth activism and community mobilising and hearing the ways that sound and voice carry social movements across time and space. I regularly produce spatial art-research pieces that seek to make new maps of Athens and its Mediterranean relations, gathered together on my site Undercartographies.
One day I would like to write a book on music as geopoetics.
I convene the postgraduate courses Migratory Activisms, Creative Citizenships and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Migration, and the undergraduate course Space and Society. I also teach the undergraduate courses Global Events and Migration and Transnationalism.
I am soon to be a Co-I on the project “Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing” (ERC Consolidator Grant led by Dr Anna Papaeti). I was previously a Marie Curie fellow in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo and an Early Career Fellow in Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford. Before that, I graduated with degrees in music and cultural studies from the Universities of Liverpool and Edinburgh, completing an AHRC-funded PhD at the latter in 2016.
- Teaching
I teach on the following modules:
Undergraduate
- Space and Society (GEOG0150, Convener)
- Global Events (GEOG0015)
- Migration and Transnationalism (GEOG0039)
- Thinking Geographically I (GEOG0151)
- Thinking Geographically II (GEOG0012)
Postgraduate
- Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Migration (GEOG0127, Convener)
- Migratory Activisms, Creative Citizenship (GEOG0167, Convener)
- Publications
To view Dr Western's publications, please visit UCL Profiles:
- Research Interests
My research combines focuses on movements and migrations, cities and creativities, relations and imaginations, activisms and anticolonialisms. I do this through two main approaches.
First, by focusing on spatial imaginations and spatial resistance, and how people invent and inscribe geographies at street level, particularly in the face of border regimes and their in-built colonialities. My work on “Undercartographies” attempts to bring these things into representation, writing spaces through modes of creative urban research that think in mobilities and hold together the multiple spatial imaginations and strategies that converge in a single place.
Second, by thinking with music, sound, and voice, and how their forms and textures offer ways of understanding geographies in relation. I work with music as a kind of geopoetics – opening ways of understanding places and movements through a vocabulary of rhythm, resonance, antiphony, counterpoint, fugue, and feedback. A recent project sought to hear these relations through a “Mediterradio” produced with friends and colleagues in Athens, Nablus, Damascus, and Alexandria. And I’m now planning some work on this in wider geographical and historical contexts.
- Impact
Producing public-facing media is a key part of my research. I’m committed to working collaboratively and with creative media of sound and radio. Here are some recent things I’ve made, and public projects I’ve been part of:
- “Ασύρματος (Mediterradio)”. A radio special for Movement Radio, as part of the Ulysses: European Odyssey project, funded by Creative Europe, 2023
- Organiser and moderator of public discussion, “8 Athenians discuss: What does it mean to be an active citizen today?” Part of the Society Uncensored series, run by the Onassis Cultural Centre, 2022
- Invited artist and researcher for “The City Talks Back” Residency and Public Assembly in Athens, organised by the Onassis Cultural Centre and Theatrum Mundi. My piece was titled “Παγκόσμια Ηχώ | Echos-Monde | The World is Echo”, 2020-2021
- Co-producer of a series for Movement Radio in Athens - including the shows “Relational City”, “al’Athinioun”, and “The Movement Exists in Voice and Sound”, 2020-present
- Co-founder of the Citizen Sound Archive with the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum in Athens, 2018-present
- Research Students
I'm a new lecturer at UCL and am currently undertaking training in research supervision. I am not yet able to be the primary supervisor on doctoral projects but am very happy to hear from prospective students with related research interests to discuss possible supervision arrangements with me as second supervisor.
