SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Overview

Internal Supervisors

• Stephen P Hughes
• Trevor H J Marchand
• Edward Simpson

Biography

Anthropology of urban space and architecture, post-colonialism, material culture, phenomenology, anthropology of the state.

PhD Research

My research will examine the plurality of social, political, economic, sensorial and technological forces that shape, constrain and foster a particular way of “being in the world” in Casablanca's oldest slum area. Infamous as the birthplace of the suicide bombers who committed the 2003 and 2007 bomb attacks on the city, Hay Mohammadi was the site of French experimentation with modernist housing in the early 1950s and hailed as the birthplace of a culturally specific “vernacular modernism”, based on ethnological studies of the existing shantytown. While the housing project has received its share of attention from architectural historians, the inhabitants of Hay Mohammadi are largely missing from the picture. By focusing on everyday life in two of the emblematic housing projects designed by the French still in existence today, this project will investigate the mechanisms, tactics and dwelling practices by which people construct, ground and attach meaning to a contested urban space. Using a methodological approach that integrates participant observation with an array of audio-visual and map-making methods, this study will document the agency of the inhabitants as legitimate ‘bricoleurs’ of counter spaces of living. The main questions guiding my investigation are: To what extent is a meaningful experience of the everyday available to those struggling at the margins and what can be learned from moments of meaninglessness? How do various forms of power, both dominant and resilient, become represented through spatial practices in Hay Mohammadi?

PhD Conferences

• Donegan, Brendan (2009) "Spaces for negotiation and mass action within the National Rural Health Mission: ‘Community monitoring plus’ and people’s organisations in tribal areas of Maharashtra”, Postgraduate Seminar Series, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India 24 February 2009.
• Donegan, Brendan (2009) "Latour, ethnography and the Indian People's Health Movement", Engaged voices? Ethnographic approaches toward social movements, Institute for European Ethnology, University of Munster, Munster, Germany 27 July 2009.
• Donegan, Brendan (2009) "Find the everyday elsewhere: Situating the global in the talk of an Indian health activist", South Asian Anthropologists Group (SAAG) 2009, Genealogies of thought and ‘Indian Sociology’, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London 22 September 2009.
• Donegan, Brendan (Forthcoming) "The Pure Gift and Dirty Money:
  Factionalism and Talk About Voluntarism Among Indian Activists", LSE South Asia Seminars, London School of Economics, London November 2009.

PhD Affiliations

Affiliate of the Moroccan Centre for Social Science Research (CM2S)