Alexandra Atkeson

My DPhil project traces San Francisco's guerrilla gardeners as they interrupt and transform the urban landscape through small-scale, creative interventions. Paying particular attention to their interactions with the hostile architecture that shapes the politics of visibility in metropolitan centres, my research builds on ongoing cross-disciplinary debates that evaluate guerrilla gardeners' capacity to pursue and enact 'spatial justice,' democratising the 'right to the city,' (Soja 2010; Lefebvre 1968). Simultaneously engaging so-called "defensive" urban design, my project seeks to illuminate the violent spatial ordering realised through mundane and often overlooked features of the "modern" cityscape while envisioning courses of resistance that re-configure and re-purpose these sites.

I am originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. Before my DPhil course, I completed an undergraduate degree in International Relations and Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and an MSc in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

My DPhil project is supervised by Dr Elizabeth Ewart and Dr Eben Kirksey at the University of Oxford.