Professor Rachel Sara
Rachel Sara’s research explores the way in which health and wellbeing can be affected by architecture and design. She also explores ‘other' forms of architecture, specifically examining transdisciplinary architecture practices through collaborations between architecture and dance, co-design and hands-on, community-based architectural activism. Rachel is passionate about architecture education and explores the role of live projects, the design review or crit, the design of teaching and learning spaces, and feminist teaching praxis. She runs an M.Arch studio unit and the Special Study module.
Rachel also leads research within the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design (BSoAD) with a particular focus on design research and practice-based outputs. She also leads the Urban Cultures Research Cluster.
Dr Jieling Xiao
Dr Jieling Xiao is a Reader in Architecture and Sensory Environment at Birmingham School of Architecture and Design. Her research focuses on understanding, assessing and enhancing the perceptual qualities of public spaces via design, public participatory and artistic inputs, with a focus on sounds and smells. She has led the Research Topic in Frontiers on “Smells, wellbeing and the built environment” and co-edited the handbook of research on “Perception Driven Approaches to Urban Assessment and Design”. Most recently, she is looking at sensory sustainability and designing inclusive environments with multi-senses, addressing the impacts of climate change and covid-19 pandemic on underrepresented communities.
Professor Victoria Hunter
Rowan Watson is an architect over twenty years of parallel experience of architecture and dance. Rowan is especially interested in how our somatic knowledge and physical interactions with our environs affect the way in which we experience and imagine places. Experience of Laban’s Movement Analysis, Contact Improvisation and Gabriel Roth’s five rhythms have motivated this interest, informing both this research and Rowan’s architectural design and lecturing practice at Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. Rowan is involved in co-developing projects that inspire and immerse students in design through craft and direct, embodied responses to place. The strength of the relationship between physical movement and perception of place is emphasized in the findings of her Masters dissertation (Watson 2014), which highlights some of the inter-relationships between processes of making; design/build studios; haptic experience; perception; instinct and our emotional response to our environs.
Vicky Hunter is a Practitioner-Researcher and Professor in Site Dance and Choreography at the University of Chichester. Her research explores site dance and corporeal engagements with space, place and lived environments. She is co-author of (Re) Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Themes (2019) with Melanie Kloetzel and Karen Barbour, and editor of Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance (Routledge, 2015). Her monograph Site, Dance and Body: Movement, Materials and Corporeal Engagement was published with Palgrave in March 2021. Her project A Holding Space (2020-ongoing) explores site-dance performance in woodland spaces and participatory workshops in which members of the public explore themes of touch, proximity to other bodies (both human-nonhuman) in a post-lockdown world.
Rowan Watson