Writing on Photography as a Creative Method of Engagement

Mia has explored how photography can be used not only in the dissemination of research but in the process of discovery and collaboration.

Through her community projects and academic work, Mia has explored how urban photography can be used to explore space and its users' experience. Her PhD, which focused on everyday independent, immigrant-owned commercial places in Central London, used the camera to explore the vibrant material and celebrate the ad hoc creative urban practice inherent to these places.

The process of taking and looking at images was used by both Mia and her research participants to explore spaces together. In 2014, she published an article in "Geography Compass" entitled “Urban photography/Cultural geography: Spaces, objects, events.” This was followed in 2016 by a published photo essay in "GeoHumanities", entitled “A politics of the urban ordinary: The material ad hoc-ness of shops in London”. Mia has presented her work and images at conferences in the UK, Canada and the United States, and was part of an online exhibition of work in a photo-essay entitled “Ambiguity in Analogue”.