IAS Research Themes 2020-21

Each theme is open to the widest possible interpretation and is assumed to address the concerns of many disciplines and departments while providing a frame for thinking across or even bypassing entrenched or established modes of thinking. It may be useful for prospective applicants to know that the conversations we have been having around each have included the following concerns:

Growth

• The action, process or manner of growing, in both material and immaterial senses
• Biological growth processes (micro-organisms, plants, human bodies) and their links to social, ecological and environmental processes
• Economic growth, expansion and development, theories of growth and their critiques, extravagance and excess, limits, predictions and omens, anti-growth, de-growth, negative growth, beyond growth: new, radical social/economic models, growth and shrinkage, expansion and retraction
• Responses to growth, planning, development, post-development and dependency, utopias and dystopias of growth, migration and control
• Green growth, ecological development, sustainable growth, agriculture and agribusiness, cultivation and curation
• Aesthetics of growth, live art, decay and degeneration, poetics and portrayals, invasion and pests
• Sickness and growth, tumescence, excrescence and pathology, malignancy and morbidity, health and healing, weakening and waning, restoration and renewal
• Maturation and metamorphosis, development, growth targets, stunted/accelerated growth, stages and stagnation, life cycles and evolution
• Value and ethics of growth, spiritual and psychological growth, improvement and achievement
• Prowess and excitation, sexuality and swelling, images and icons, figurations and fantasies

Traffic

• The transportation of merchandise for the purpose of trade, commerce, commercialism, deals and markets, ships and shipping, movement and markets
• The buying and selling or exchange of goods for profit: bargaining, barter, business
• Histories, theories and representations/figurations of trade, exchange, profiteering and commerce
• Illicit trade, wheeling and dealing, smuggling, steeling and stealth, intersectional bias, corruption and punishment, influence peddling
• The passing of persons or of goods and vehicles or vessels, along a road, railway, canal, or other route of transportation; traffic infrastructures, formal and informal, legitimate and illegal
• The passage of people and goods via routes and roadways, the organisation and flow of ‘traffic’
• Traffic blocks and blockages, flows and conduits, jams and bottlenecks
• Technologies of traffic, digital and data, AI and the exchange of information and the transfer/tracking/trading of stuff
• The traffic in images, image exchange, mediation and meaning
• The trade/traffic in people, human trafficking, labour and slavery, sexual exploitation and crime, borders and controls, traffic of organs and vital resources
• The exchange/traffic in/of women, kinship and kidnap, social systems and barter