Dr. Malini Guha (2025-2027)
Traction, Flight, Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines
Malini Guha (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and the 2025-27 holder of the Ruth and Mark Philips Professorship in Cultural Mediations. Guha is cross-appointed with the Institute for Studies in Art and Culture and is affiliated with Migration and Diaspora Studies. She is a settler of South Asian descent.
She is the author of From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Elizabeth Evans) of London as Screen Gateway (Routledge University Press, 2023). Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, NECSUS, PUBLIC: Art \Culture| Ideas, Mediapolis, Screening the Past and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Screen and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.
Guha is currently working on a research project that revisits a number of longstanding questions and debates about cinema and reality by attending to the dynamics of traction, flight and becoming. She was awarded a FASS Mid-Career Research Grant (2021) for this project as well as a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2023-2025). As part of her SSHRC grant, she commissioned artist, curator and educator Neven Lochhead to produce Something Happened (2024), a residency and exhibition platform based in Tamworth, Ontario.
2025-27 Theme: Traction, Flight, Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines
Guha’s project for the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship,“Traction, Flight Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines ” will facilitate and nurture what scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe as a “common intellectual practice” of geographical thinking across disciplinary divides. This project is both inspired and deeply indebted to the work of abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, alongside activists and organizers Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, all of whom espouse the necessity for ‘thinking like a geographer” for the building of better worlds.
Through a graduate seminar, the formation of a working group and events including informal talks and keynote lectures, ICSLAC students and scholars will have opportunities to engage in individual practices of geographical thinking that resonate with their own pre- existing research interests. Gradually, the project will facilitate a turn towards the university as a site of proximate speculations, where geographical thinking can be drawn upon to reimagine the ways we inhabit and labour in the university during a time of austerity and ever increasing modes of precarity.
Read a short interview with Dr. Guha about her project.