Current Postgraduate Students
Mr Nathaniel O'Grady
Contact Mr Nathaniel O'Grady (email at nathaniel.o'grady@durham.ac.uk)
Research Interests
- Representations and treatment of temporality in contemporary socio-geographical formations
- Spatiality, sound and power
- Urban geography
- Security and Risk Studies
- Continental philosophy
Teaching and Demonstrating Duties
- Urban Geographies
- Social Research Methods
Doctoral Thesis: ERSC (CASE) Studentship: Data and Decision in UK Emergency Preparedness: A case study of the Fire and Rescue Service
This ethnographic study of the County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service can be split into two broad aims. Firstly, my research will provide prescriptive advice to the Service on the sources, methods and techniques used to identify locally prevailing risks along with how decisions are made to enact prevention, protection and resilience strategies. Accompanying these policy-driven questions, my research will develop and establish a new conceptual framework through which debates around anticipatory action and what maybe referred to as the 'governance of the future' may be addressed. In attempting to integrate the theoretical excursions of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Jea-Luc Nancy in particular, my research takes up a number of lines of inquiry; from what relations of power become forged in contemporary risk governance? and how can heterogeneous agents coalesce to render anticipatory action possible? to how do we negotiate risk management with the ultimately unknowable future this risk management seeks to secure?