Paper short abstract

Through the lens of mobile SMART phones and time-based thermal imaging technology, the creative project, ‘Other Lines’, considers how to visualise air pollutants, hidden climate patterns and unstable atmospheres emitted by industrial plants and fuel production installations 
in the United Kingdom.

Paper long abstract

In the twenty-first century, air pollution is an expanding visual and technological phenomenon that undoubtedly affects how we invariably see and perceive ‘climate change’ in urban and rural landscapes. The creative project, ‘Other Lines’, considers how to visualise air pollutants and particulates generated from industrial sites at ground level within the Earth’s atmospheric boundary layer. Technological developments in digital image-making and the circulation of images in virtual and terrestrial environments open up alternative opportunities to communicate and see beyond demarcated thresholds between these settings. Consequently, how I engage creatively with virtual and physical landscapes is embodied in this specific project. Through the lens of mobile SMART phones and thermal imaging technology, the digital artworks in this project attentively examine Henri Lefebvre’s philosophical concepts of ‘differentiated time.’ My experimental approaches to visualising environmental conditions in selected industrial sites in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, United Kingdom, offer site-responsive opportunities to instantly produce photographic and time-based visual interpretations of hidden or inconspicuous renderings of climate patterns and unstable atmospheres. Exploratory sites of poor air quality typically include roads, local waterways, established factories, industrial plants and fuel production installations. Furthermore, spatial engagement and active movement along the Wirral Peninsula informed by lived experiences, perceptual imaginations and phenomenological discourse is integral to this productive process. As a published result, my time-based visual research experiments contemplate how thermal imaging reveals the unseen and the seen industrial air emissions at Stanlow, Cheshire, United Kingdom.

Paper short abstract

Examines queer engagements with law and visibility since the Trans Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 in Pakistan. Part of a PhD thesis exploring entanglements of decolonial justice and colonial states, and ethnographic reversal of optics in photographic renderings of the transphobic gaze

Paper long abstract

This paper describes the cultural emplacement of trans rights in the face of Jihad-e Loot, best translated as a religious war against trans persons, in Pakistan. In 2018, Pakistan introduced the Trans Persons (Protection of Rights) Act which granted citizenship to its trans communities, including the queer indigenous community of khwaja sira. Introducing the possibility of trans citizenship has put competing and multi faceted narratives of Pakistani identity and history in conversation. One such narrative portrays Pakistan as ‘land of the pure’ and enacts an Islamic conservatism which equates gender variance with “fitnah’ or social impurity. This conservatism is enshrined in the Pakistani legal system in the shape of the Shari’ah Court which positions itself in equivalence to the Supreme Court of Pakistan, holding the right to judicially review its decisions. It retains the legal power to question all and any law according to Shari’ah or Islamic jurisprudence.

In the face of sociolegal and political narrowing of possibilities for the enactment of rights, I follow the ethnographic use of a lomographic rendering of everyday faces by transpersons as they capture images of transphobia. As the community calls for the murders of trans persons to be tried in Anti-Terrorist Courts, I discuss the possibilities of visualizing intimate social micro-interactions as ethnographic and legal artifacts documenting the changing meaning of citizenship and the decolonization of justice. This paper looks at the intersection of ethnographic images, legal evidence and the demarcations of political legitimacy in a lawscape of Islamic ethics and trans activism.