Dr Leila Dawney is Associate Professor in Human Geography in the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy at the University of Exeter. A social theorist and cultural geographer, Dr Dawney’s research focuses on community experience and social and economic change.
Her recent research focused on the relationship between deindustrialisation and endurance through fieldwork in a former nuclear town in Lithuania, exploring emergent forms of social and collective life in the wake of nuclear decommissioning and urban decline. She has worked with the Lithuania National Drama Theater and photographers Laurie Griffiths and Jonty Tacon to generate new ways of communicating community responses to nuclear decommissioning, including the acclaimed documentary theatre production Green Meadow and the touring exhibition Babochka.
She is currently developing a larger project on nuclear afterlives, which will explore the shifting temporalities of the nuclear project and its aftermath through a series of ethnographic analyses of nuclear communities.
She has written on nuclear temporalities, particularly with regard to the concept of deep time and nuclear waste storage. In 2022 she participated in a workshop on Temporalities of Nuclear Waste organised by Thomas Keating and Anna Storm at Linköping University. She is currently supervising two students working on temporality and community in relation to nuclear infrastructures.
Relevant publications:
Dawney, L., 2021. The multiple temporalities of infrastructure: Atomic cities and the memory of lost futures. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(3), pp.405-422.
Dawney, L., 2021. “Dramatising deindustrialisation” in W. Price, M. Rhodes II, A. Walker (eds.) Geographies of Post-Industrial Memory, Place, and Heritage pp 123-138 London: Routledge.
Dawney, L., 2020. “Decommissioned places: Ruins, endurance and care at the end of the first nuclear age” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(1): pp. 33-49.
Dawney, L, Harris O, and Sorensen, T., 2017. “Future Worlds: Anticipatory archaeology and the late human legacy” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4(1 pp107-129.
Dawney, L., 2017. “On finding hope beyond progress” in Dawney et al. (eds.) Problems of Hope Lewes: ARN Press.
Dawney, L. and Brigstocke, J., 2016. “Into Eternity” in Brigstocke, J and Noorani, T. (eds.) Listening with Non-Human Others pp 75-84 Lewes: ARN Press.