The Department of Geography and Environment at Loughborough University is inviting applications for a Doctoral Studentship to start in October 2026.
“Why and how are some lives depicted and positioned as expendable while others are deemed not just worth protecting but also of exemplary treatments?” is the question that broadly drives this project given the starkly differentiated regards for human lives and rights on a planetary scale. While existing scholarship offers an answer, it fails to differentiate between the expendable and the exemplary lives; instead, it dilutes both within the same framework of the exception primarily inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s reding of the state, sovereignty, biopolitics, and the exception (1998, 2005). Read accordingly, although the example operates on a similar assumption but in the opposite manner, has remained unexamined in political geography and other cognate disciplines. The project stems from such observations that “the sovereign’s power is manifested not only via the production of a state of exception but also equally through the creation of a state of example” hence, remains underpinned by the production of both a homo sacer and a homo exemplar (Ferdoush, 2025, p. 1). It aims to pursue one overarching goal which is to answer: Why, where, how, on whom, and for how long does the sovereign decide to display its power of the example? This is informed by three specific objectives:
- To spatially locate the example within and beyond the exception,
- To identify how time is used in the creation and treatment of exemplary cases and,
- To investigate the arbitrary power of the sovereign in treating categories as exemplary or exceptional as it wills.
The project will primarily use ethnographic and participatory approaches including tools such as interviews, FGDs, and observation along with auto-photography and activity-journals with protection seekers across Bangladesh, Finland, and the UK. The doctoral researcher will be primarily responsible for the UK sites (the Midlands and Greater London, provisionally) conducting ethnographic fieldwork while will also be required to visit other field sites briefly as part of the broader design of the project inspired by co-creative approaches. The interview transcripts will be subject to systematic qualitative analysis in order to ensure the rigorous interpretation of the data. Project results will be disseminated to multi-disciplinary academic and policy audiences.
The project is funded by The Leverhulme Trust’s Research Leadership Award. It is a multi-year and multi-sited collaboration between different team members of the project. The successful candidate will play a full role in the design, execution and dissemination of the project under the supervision of Dr Azmeary Ferdoush, Geography and Environment, School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University.
Interviews for this studentship are expected to take place in mid-July 2026.
Informal enquiries should be made to Dr Azmeary Ferdoush, Lecturer in Human Geography, by email at m.ferdoush@lboro.ac.uk