Dr Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh (IAG Award for Dissertation Excellence) Citation

The IAG Award for Dissertation Excellence is made at Honours, Masters, or PhD level, and acknowledges the disciplinary contribution that the candidate has made to geography. 

Awardee: Dr Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh

For dissertation entitled: Lives, Lines, Lights: Problematising geographic think-practices with Glissant and Deleuze and Guattari.

The dissertation constructs a highly-original and creative engagement with the conceptual apparatus of Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and channels that framework into a critical examination of the ways in which Western narratives of progress, dialectic reasoning and genealogy permeate academic thinking in pernicious but often overlooked ways, including through citation, reading, discussion, method, and how we understand influence, appropriation and biography.

Out of this context the creativity of this dissertation is in practicing alternative modes of academic writing, not as a substitute to academic traditions but to re-imagine the very ecologies of thinking itself, a task that, as Tara shows, has resonance not only for academia but also in the politics of expression of the arts and everyday life. One of the outstanding contributions of this research has been careful and meticulous engagement with the archives of Glissant’s thought, a thinker who is only just becoming celebrated as a key theorist of the 20th century, both by turning to Glissant’s philosophical and poetic texts, and to resources on Glissant’s life and political activism. There is stringent appreciation for the application of ideas in some of the pressing political fautlines in our contemporary condition: competing worldview positions formed through history and religion where spaces of representation emerge in ways which challenge easy assumptions about ethics and politics in the freedom of speech; a history of thought whose less questioned principles have opened up a present vulnerability around the integrity of expertise in science and trust in politics such that society is seemingly unprepared for the challenge of climate change and populism.

A dissertation examiner writes: “[the dissertation] ...is an original and timely contribution ... it centres Édouard Glissant’s philosophical thinking on difference and is the first in-depth, positive, compelling and non-extractive geographical reading of the thought, life and writing of the Martinican poet, philosopher, playwright and novelist. Tara’s moving introductory story of mixed-race identity sparks the well-articulated central question and frames how a strong argument intervenes in racialized geographical imaginaries that frame the non-West as a space of thought. She stages 3-way encounters between Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari which suggest a generous exchange of ideas that contributed to their learning with each other, rather than a hierarchical trickling down of Western thought.  Tara’s engagement with Glissant’s concept of opacity makes an original contribution to the field of geography that has already been recognised and is mobilising contemporary debates on difference.”