Welcome to David L. Martin

David joins us for a one-year secondment as a Visiting Fellow working across the Visual and Material, Moving Bodies and Narrative Practices Labs.

An art-historian and postcolonial politics researcher by training, David is interested in the politics of space, its attendant representational forms in maps, charts, and cartographic logics, and the disenfranchisements, disempowerments and dispossessions they engender. 

Originally from Melbourne, David has been working in the Politics Department at Goldsmiths since 2011 where he has been engaging with practice-based teaching and research, and community-engaged research techniques, to devise a series of critical and embodied methodologies under the banner of Counter Mapping.  

As a methodology focused on exploring individual and collective experiences of dominant spatial logics, and practical resistances to them, David will be bringing Counter Mapping's focus on empowerment and collective action to the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities in the calendar year of 2024, for what it can lend to theorisations and practices of health activism and recovery, survivor research, and trauma mapping. More than this, the re-narrations of space which Counter Mapping produces have great potential in helping local and marginalised communities engage with and challenge long-held beliefs about health in the region. 

David is Lecturer in Visual and International Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London and Deputy Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths. He is an Editor of Postcolonial Studies (Taylor & Francis), co-editor (with Sanjay Seth and Francisco Carballo) of the four-volume Postcolonial Politics published by Routledge, and a founding editor of postcolonialpolitics.org. Exhibitions include: Manual Labour: Making/Making Do (with Reardon and Marshall) 2013; "Performing Matter" in Test Run, Oxford Modern Art, 2014. His monograph Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred was published with MIT Press in 2011. 

We warmly welcome David to Durham and look forward to working with him over the next twelve months.