Creative Challenge Series

Maintaining a multidisciplinary art practice, spanning drawing, printmaking, and video, Nicole Maloof’s work investigates social relations, zooming in and out from the level of personal intimacy to the larger scale of society. Through these mediums, Nicole challenges and explores the artifice of categorical boundaries, and by extension, their social repercussions. In exploring new ways of knowledge delivery and learning, Nicole constantly investigates what it means to know, and asks: is it possible to trust conventional disciplines and institutions of knowledge, let alone our own individual sensory input and resulting memories?

Claire Gordon is the Director of LSE’s Eden Centre and sits on a number of School Committees and working groups. Claire is the Departmental Adviser to the departments of Economic History, the European Institute, Government, International Relations and Sociology, and has a particular interest in reward and recognition in higher education, developing research-based curricula to empower students in their learning, and assessment and feedback. Prior to joining the Eden Centre, Claire worked for ten years as a teaching fellow at the LSE’s European Institute with a particular focus on transition, EU enlargement and emerging political economies in Central and South East Europe and has been involved in a number of higher education and research capacity building projects in the Westerns Balkans.

Josefina Nelimarkka graduated from the Royal College of Art in London and the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. She was the artist-in-residence at SPACE Art + Technology in 2018 and the SMEAR II international climate research station in 2019. Currently, she contributes to Intelligence Debiased Research Group at Exposed Arts Projects. In her research-based practice, Josefina is engaged with the politics of air, the circulation of climate and the phenomenology of environmental data. In examining the interactive space arising from the transient states, between process and the physical world, her works and exhibitions encourage people to rethink their relationship with the natural world and bring the critical connections between atmosphere, ecosystem and society into question.

Ganga Shreedha is an Assistant Professor in Behavioural Science in LSE’s Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, and an Affiliate of the Department of Geography and Environment. Ganga is an applied behavioural and experimental economist studying how to change human behaviour in ways that simultaneously benefit people and the planet. She is interested in how, when and why people take action - or fail to – to address complex and ‘wicked’ global environmental social dilemmas like climate change and the sixth mass extinction.

Working at the interface between photography, video, and 3D animation, Linn Phyllis Seeger’s work is rooted in digital photographic practices and screen-based media. She examines tools of identity formation, generating case studies of how to bear up against the abstract spaces of virtuality, and urban landscapes. As both a PHD candidate at the Royal College of Art and curator of the PhotoBook Museum in Cologne, Linn Phyllis Seeger lives and works in the cloud.

Ellen Helsper is Professor of Digital Inequalities in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, and Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications (Research). Her current research interests include the links between social and digital inequalities; mediated interpersonal communication; participatory immersive digital spaces (VR, ER); and quantitative and qualitative methodological developments in media and communications research. Ellen consults widely for governments, the third and commercial sectors on issues to do with client and citizen engagement in increasingly digital societies.

In addition to teaching photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design of Lausanne, Zoé Aubry founded the non-profit association noeme which has worked for the diffusion and reflection on the contemporary artistic image and the magazine KILOMÈTRES, a research space linking curatorial, theoretical and visual approaches. Based on anthropological investigations, Zoé’s artistic practice is built on a relationship between societal phenomena and individual experiences. Creating spaces of confrontation, her work is a criticism of contemporary society, juggling between critical, poetic and political dimensions.

Sumi Madhok is Associate Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Trained as a feminist political theorist, Sumi’s research, writing and teaching is organised around the central question: how does one produce theory and concepts in ‘non-standard’ background conditions? As a committed interdisciplinary scholar, her teaching and scholarship lies at the intersection of feminist political theory and philosophy, coloniality / postcoloniality, transnational activism and social movements, rights/human rights, citizenship, developmentalism and ethnography.