Sana Murrani [SanaMurraniCV]
BSc Arch, MSc Arch, PhD

Sana Murrani is an Associate Professor in Spatial Practice with a background in Architecture and Urban Design. She is the Deputy Director of the Doctoral College for the Arts and Humanities at the University of Plymouth, UK. Sana’s main research falls within the field of architecture in particular, the imaginative negotiations of spatial practices and social justice. She focuses on highlighting the impact of transient conditions of war, conflict, and displacement on people’s creative spatial responses to sudden changes in their built environment and the making (or re-making) of the concept of home and collective imaginary housing for the future. Sana’s research methods are embedded in participatory action research approaches and creative mapping techniques that rely on spatial thinking, memory mapping, and speculative and imaginative drawing and layering. She studied architecture at Baghdad University School of Architecture at both under-graduate and post-graduate level. Sana completed her PhD in the UK on the theoretical encounters and the critique of architectural representation and material culture under the influence of technology. She is the founder of the Displacement Studies Research Network, working at the intersection between displacement, design, and creativity to research, share, and enhance the impact and power of the creative agencies of displaced peoples, their identity, memory and the spaces and places they create and inhabit. She is the principal investigator for Creative Recovery: Mapping Refugees’ Memories of Home, as Heritage funded by the European Cultural Foundation. The project is in partnership with British Red Cross, and is based on co-produced creative research with refugees and asylum seekers in the Southwest of England. Currently she is working on a collaborative research project with Dr Rachael Kiddey from the University of Oxford, mapping the material culture of displacement with a group of Refugees in the UK, Sweden and Greece. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and participated in international conferences and workshops. Sana is currently an Advising Editor for Leonardo Reviews: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, a guest reviewer for Routledge Architecture section and a member of the ESRC Global Challenge Research Fund Peer Review College.