About me

I’m a final-year PhD researcher at Northumbria University exploring how activist art and radical social praxis might create spaces for acts of resistance and liberation.  The research particularly focuses on interventions which support movements that oppose gentrification, displacement and corporate capitalism and seek creative new approaches to developing radical socialist democracies.  My work is deeply rooted in critical theory.  My deeply intradisciplinary approach spans urban geography, aesthetics, politics and political theory, cultural policy, economics, decolonisation and border thinking, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theories, sociology, and visual and material cultures.

I’ve lectured and presented widely including at the Association of American Geographers 2016 Conference in San Francisco, Durham University, the University of Warwick, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Arts Council England National Office.  I was also one of a panel of academics consulted in the production of Everyday Creativity: From Great Art and Culture for Everyone to Great Arts and Culture by, with and for Everyone, a radical proposal for rethinking cultural policy for Arts Council England.

I’m a gamekeeper turned poacher.

I like to move from outside in and inside out.

I’m interested by the spaces in which we live.

I’m an art historian, writer, activist and community arts practitioner.

I founded dot to dot active arts in 2013 and closed it in 2016.

My starting point for this blog: Everybody’s socially engaged nowadays…

I tweet like a Common Redpoll that’s been force-fed gallons of viscous demented liquor.

www.twitter.com/etiennelefleur