缅北禁地

Biography

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working across landscape studies and planning, human geography, security studies, and performance studies. My research examines how landscapes, people and more-than-humans, and security practices intersect, while also developing innovative social research methodologies grounded in creative, embodied, and participatory approaches.

My work coheres around four interconnected areas of inquiry:

1. Borderscapes, Geopolitics & Lived Experience

I investigate the cultural and political geographies of international borders and securitised landscapes, focusing on how everyday life, embodiment, and emotional experience shape and are shaped by geopolitical processes. This includes research on international borders, mobility, militarism, and post/conflict and humanitarian border approaches, as well as the intimate practices through which individuals and communities navigate everyday security, governance, and diplomacy.

2. Multispecies Relations

A significant strand of my research explores human–non-human entanglements, particularly in contexts where security, ecology, and governance intersect. This includes work on microbial security and public health, coastal and marine multispecies ecosystems, and wilding and nature‑based approaches to environmental transformation. Through this lens, I examine how multispecies thinking reshapes understandings of stewardship, vulnerability, and cohabitation in changing landscapes.

3. Verticality, Gravity & Airspace

I engage with emerging debates on vertical geographies, tracing how power, security, and embodiment are negotiated not only across territory but also through dimensions of height, depth, airspace, and gravitational experience. This includes attention to the atmospheres and infrastructures of militarism, surveillance, and mobility, as well as the affective and bodily dimensions of moving through stratified spatial fields.

4. Creativity, Performance & the Geohumanities

At the heart of my practice is a commitment to the geohumanities, using performance, choreography, and creative methods to interrogate and intervene in debates on security, governance, and (geo)politics. I explore how creative practices generate new forms of knowledge, foster alternative geopolitical imaginaries, and open space for collective inquiry and wellbeing. My work foregrounds the role of artistic and performative research in transforming how landscapes, bodies, and political structures relate.

Principally, my research traces the cultural and political geographies of performance and/or creativity, and the role of political performances in spearheading novel responses to security debates - this includes in the context of international security (international borders), militarism and mobility, public health (microbial security) and, more recently coastal landscapes (multispecies ecosystems). I am interested in the language and practices of performance and choreography for intervening in security, governance and geo/bio-politics.

Research Interests (overview)

• Landscape and embodiment
• Geographies of creativity, arts and performance
• Environmental Humanities
• Borderscape and intimate geopolitics
• Militarism, security, and gravity
• Post/conflict peace and diplomacy
• Multispecies entanglements
• Wilding and nature-based thinking
• Seascapes and the Blue Humanities
• Social science and creative methods

PhDs

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in any of the above areas.

Ongoing PhD Supervision:

• 2022-present, Anne-Sofie Beling: The More-than-Human Relations of Trans-planetary Imaginaries and Habitats (with Nick Taylor)
• 2024-present, Pinyi Liu: Topography, Power and Geopolitical Assumptions - The Military Construction and Architecture of Lushun and its Implications (with Jianfei Zhu)
• 2025-present, Irem Gulner: Beyond the Human Gaze: Visualizing More-Than-Human Flood Resilience
• 2025-present, Clive Davies: The evolution of ecosystem-based approaches (EbA) in landscape-scale planning processes: strategies, plans and policies (with Andrew Donaldson)

Roles and Responsibilities

• SAPL Director of Research
• REF29 Prep-Group
• Co-Director The Landscape Collaboratory (with Maggie Roe)
• NUCoRE Landscape Theme Co-Lead. NUCoRE Landscape ECR Co-Lead
• APL Research Committee
• APL Northern Bridge Selection Committee
• Co-Director of Performance Research Network (with Ruth Raynor and Emma Whipday)
• Former Degree Programme Director for MA Landscape Architecture Studies

External Roles and Responsibilities

• External Examiner for MSc Architecture, Landscape and Environment, University of Edinburgh
• Landscape Research Group Board of Trustees
• Natural England and Marine Management Organisation, Landscape-Seascape Working Group
• Landscape Research Group Board of Trustees
• Editorial Board Cultural Geographies
• International Advisory Board for Landscape Research

Education

2016-2017: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, University of Southampton

2011-2015: PhD: Geography, University of Nottingham (no corrections)

2010-2011: MA: Landscape and Culture, University of Nottingham (Distinction)

2007-2010:phy, University of Nottingham (1st)

Previous Appointments

2019-2021: Postdoctorate Fellowship in Landscape, 缅北禁地

2017-2018: Ass. Lecturer in Human Geography, Coventry University

2016-2017: Research Fellow in Human Geography, University of Southampton

2015-2017: Teaching Fellow in Human Geography, University of Southampton

Affiliations

Fellow of Higher Education Academy

Member of the Landscape Research Group / Advisory Board for the Landscape Research Group

Advisory Board for the Landscape-Seascape Advisory Board (Natural England, Marine Management Organisation)

North East Marine Management Plan Advisory Group Member

Current Research Project

Chorepolitics in the Borderland: Dance, Geopolitics and Spaces of Urban Securitisation - Fellowship in Landscape, 缅北禁地 (PI)

National borders are witnessing the unprecedented return of walls, fences, and separation barriers, as nation states across, and often between, the Global North and South seek new strategies of security in an era of geopolitical turbulence. Based upon a major piece of interdisciplinary empirical research on the US-Mexico border, this project delivers an innovative geopolitical account of the role of performance in animating and contesting securitised borderscapes. The project traces the embodied mobilities cultivated within the borderland, explores the role of dance practices to stand witness to the material and representational violences of securitisation, and explores how dance might intervene in the border to rewrite the place-producing politics of securitised borderscapes.

The Secret Life of Seaweed (Co-PI with Maggie Roe) and Dance of the Seaweed (PI with Esther Huss) - Catherine Cookson Fund, 缅北禁地 Bid Preparation Fund

The coastline plays a vital role in the history, culture and economy of the UK. Yet a historic fall in demand for domestic seaside holidays, and a decline in the fishing and shipbuilding industries, have contributed to various socio-economic challenges within these areas. The project(s) examine past and future imaginaries of human relationships with the coast through the lens of seaweed. Seaweed has long supported the economic health of coastal communities. It is receiving escalating policy and industry attention for its role in diversifying livelihoods, and as a possible solution to socio-economic and environmental challenges.  To date, the dominant view of seaweed is as a product of an increasingly commercialised, human-centric sea space. We address the disconnect between the extractive approach and an expressive, sensory seascape, post-humanistic approach. The embodied, visceral, mobile, textual, imaginaries and expressive cultures, past and present, of seaweed are examined. And, we explore a novel framing of people’s relationships with seaweed based around creative arts practice, utilising creative arts practices (including movement workshops, choreography, and dance performance) to generate knowledge and translate novel insights about lived experiences and memories to seascapes and blue nature. 

Beastly Landscapes (Co-PI with Usue Ruiz-Arana) - 缅北禁地 NICAP

Humanists and social scientists are increasingly attending to human entanglements with ‘non-human’ worlds. Through a series of events (symposiums, writing/scoring retreats, and exhibitions) we advance the ‘beast’ as the central dynamic in this encounter. Beasts have inhabited our art (Neolithic painting), landscapes (gothic literature) and science (inter-species transplants), troubling the limits of what it means to be human. Adopting a multidisciplinary framework, we trace how the beast – as creative being – might advance our sense-making of the world; de-centre human agency in the Anthropocene; and put a reign to human exceptionalism.

Past Research Projects

Routes of infection, routes to safety: Creative mapping of human-viral behaviours on the bus to understand infection prevention practices, AHRC COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant, with University of Southampton (Co-I)

There is an absence of qualitative, interdisciplinary research on the personal application of infection prevention (IP) measures, like hand-washing and mask-wearing, and its effectiveness beyond the healthcare setting. In this crisis, IP measures are critical to building confidence to resume leisure and economic activity out of the home. The project advances previous work by this team that identified a need for novel IP research which integrates behavioural, microbiological and aesthetic approaches to creatively demonstrate the interactions of human movement with microbial/viral transmission.  The case study is the public transport bus and its diverse community of users The research will: i) investigate the structural challenges in consistent application of IP in public (and private) spaces; ii) provide microbiological and sociological evidence to inform and improve effective cleaning practices for bus operators and safe travel practices for bus users; iii) generate wider public knowledge and understanding of infection risk/prevention and their geographies in shared indoor spaces.

Choreographing military bodies: Aeromobilities, embodied geopolitics, and dance-based combat training with the British Parachute Regiment - Royal Geographical Society Small Grant and the Jasmin Leila Award, University of Southampton (PI)

The archival project examines the micro-bodily regimes of British Parachute Regiment personnel during training at Ringway Aerodrome in the mid-1940s. It combines research into military- and aero-mobilities, with work on embodied geopolitics, and the emerging geographies of dance literature, to explore the making of the airborne militarised body. More specifically, the project analyses, innovatively, how military strategists solicited dance-based embodied knowledges in the furtherance of geopolitical agendas. Notably, it marshals interdisciplinary, multi-sensual archival sources to critically probe the historical role of dance theorist Rudolf Laban in the drilling and analysis of British paratrooper’s bodies during recruitment, as operationalised, and commencing assault operations. Here, I lay the foundations for examining dance-based pedagogy, including Laban’s ‘Industrial Rhythms’ and ‘Effort Analysis’, in cultivating ‘elite’ military bodies and ‘advance force’ practices. 

I am the Degree Programme Director for MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management (2023-) and former Programme Director for MA Landscape Architecture Studies (MALAS) programme (2022-23).

Current Teaching

I teach primarily across Advanced Landscape Planning and Management (ALPM) and the Landscape Architecture (MLA) programmes.

This includes:

• APL8000: Conceptualising Landscape with Landscape Project (module leader) - 20 Credit
• APL8004: Conceptualising Landscape (module leader) - 10 Credit
• APL8008: Landscape Histories (module leader) - 10 Credit
• APL8080: Landscape Histories: Project (module leader) - 20 Credit
• APL8018: Landscape Planning and Management Dissertation (module leader) - 60 Credit
• APL8026: Landscape Planning and Management: Professional Skills and Practice (module leader)
• TCP8911: Research Design (MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management lead) - 10 Credit
• APL8020/APL8010: Design with Plants and Greenspace Management (contributor) - 20 Credit
• TCP1026: Understanding Place: Methods and Perspectives (contributor) - 10 Credit
• APL3010: Climate Literacy (contributor) - 10 Credit

Past Teaching

I have taught widely in cultural and political landscape / geographies, qualitative methods and fieldwork research, and supervised undergraduate and masters dissertations, in previous roles at the University of Southampton and Coventry University.

Other

I hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

• Articles

  • Veal C, Huss E. . Cultural Geographies 2026, 33(1), 141-153.
  • Veal C. . Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2025, 50(4), e70024.
  • Graham S, Veal C, Mulvihill M. . Progress in Human Geography 2025, Epub ahead of print.
  • Zhao J, Davies C, Veal C, Rubiales JM, Xu C, Zhang X. . Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 2025, 112, 128955.
  • Raynor R, Veal C. . GeoHumanities 2023, 9(1), 158-169.
  • Veal C. . GeoHumanities 2023, 9(1), 191-210.
  • Carrer F, Veal C. . Landscape 2021, (4), 17-18.
  • Veal C. . Political Geography 2021, 86, 102354.
  • Veal C. . GeoHumanities 2020, 6(1), 65-88.
  • Veal C. . Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2020, 45(1), 139-154.
  • Roe E, Veal C, Hurley P. . Geo: Geography and Environment 2019, 6(1), e00076.
  • Veal C. . Area 2018, 50(3), 306-313.
  • Veal C. . Geoforum 2017, 81, 11-21.
  • Veal C. . Cultural Geographies 2016, 23(2), 221-245.

• Book Chapters

  • Hopkins P. . In: Merriman P; Secor A; Sumartojo S, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geographies. London: Routledge, 2026. In Press.
  • Veal C. . In: Merriman, P; Secor, A; Sumartojo, S, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geographies. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2026.
  • Rogers A, Veal C. . In: Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin, Kelly Dombroski, Junxi Qian, and Andrew Williams, ed. Introducing Human Geographies (4th Edition). London: Routledge, 2024.
  • Veal C, Hurley P, Roe E, Wilks S. . In: Cooper, F; and Fitzgerald, D, ed. Knowing COVID-19: The pandemic and beyond. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.
  • Veal C. . In: Cree, A, ed. Creative Methods in Military Studies. Bicester: Coles Books, 2023.
  • Veal C, Hawkins H. . In: de Dois A; Kong L, ed. Handbook of the Geographies of Creativity. Elgar, 2020, pp.352-369.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Veal C. . In: World Social Science Association 66th Annual Conference. 2024, San Antonio, Texas: World Social Science Association.
  • Veal C. . In: Putspace: Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting. 2022, Brussels, Belgium: HERA.

• Report

  • Roe E, Veal C, Hurley P, Wilks S. . University of Southampton, 2021.

• Reviews

  • Zhao J, Davies C, Veal C, Xu C, Zhang X, Yu F. . Forests 2024, 15(4), 727.
  • Veal C. . Cultural Geographies 2020, 27(4), 684-686.
  • Veal C. . Social and Cultural Geography 2017, 18(8), 1199-1200.
  • Veal C. Review: Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Space by Derek McCormack. Cultural Geographies 2013, 22, 376-377.