Current Postgraduate Students

Dr Dan Swanton

Contact (email at d.j.swanton@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

2008- Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Geography, Durham University
2007-2008 ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, Durham University
2007 PhD in Geography, Durham University
2003 MA in Geography, University of British Columbia
2001 BA in Geography, University of Oxford

There are two main themes to my research: i.) rethinking economies through their materialities and ii.)materialisations of race and urban multiculture. Both themes emerge from interests in questions of matter and materiality, the taking form of social relations, and ethnography.

Rethinking economies through their materialities:
My work as a postdoctoral research associate on 'The Waste of the World' project involves diagramming material flows and transformations in the steel industry to expose the entangled geographies of steelmaking, which forms part of a broader interest in rethinking economies through their materialities. In particular I am working with the concept of assemblage to understand how arrangements of heterogeneous elements more or less cohere on a steel plan in ways that bring disorder, complexity, confusion, interruption and multiplicity to the fore. The concept of assemblage - allied to the montage form - offers an alternative method and aesthetics for doing economic geography.

Materialisations of race and urban multiculture:
My second research theme builds on doctoral and postdoctoral research that involved ethnographic fieldwork in Keighley, a northern mill town in England. Three entangled lines of inquiry emerged from this research. First, the research develops a materialist engagement with race that emphasises the continuous formation, or becoming, or race in moments of encounter through assemblages of bodies, things, and surroundings. Empirically, this work focuses on exposing the temporary fixings of race enacted through particular bodies, flash cars and taxis, and certain settings. Second, my research is interested in the nexus of race and affect, aiming to apprehend and map the force and affective intensities through with which race comes to matter in moments of encounter. Third, the research seeks to grasp the turbulent socialities of multiculture and messy and challenging underside of intercultural relations in northern mill towns. This orientation to the socialities of multiculture grounds a critique of recent returns to questions segregation and interaction through discourses of ‘parallel lives’ and ‘community cohesion’ in response to urban disturbances and terror attacks. It also begins to explore the terrain for conviviality based on an ethics of life itself and ethics of the human.

Research Projects
The Waste of the World

Research Groups
Social/Spatial Theory
Lived and Material Cultures
Centre for the Study of Cities and Regions

Research Groups

• Social / Spatial Theory (SST)

Publications

Books: sections

• Swanton, Dan Everyday Multiculture and the Emergence of Race. In: Dwyer, Claire & Bressey, Caroline New Geographies of Race and Racism. Aldershot: Ashgate; 2008:239-254. (Additional information)

Journal papers: online

• Swanton, Dan The force of race. Darkmatter. 2008. (Additional information) (View publication online)