Sana Murrani

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 undergraduate and postgraduate 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 an alumna of the International School in Forced Migration (cohort 2021) at the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

She is the founder of the Displacement Studies Research Network and co-founder of the Justice and Imagination in Global Displacement research collective, working at the intersection between displacement, design, imagination and justice 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. She recently completed 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. Sana is the co-investigator for Forced to Flee project funded (2022-2025) by the NIHR. She is currently writing a monograph contracted by Bloomsbury to be published in 2024 titled: Ruptured Architecture: spatial practices of refuge in response to war and violence in Iraq. Alongside the book, she has secured funding as PI for the fieldwork part with the British Institute for the Study of Iraq on a project titled: Ruptured Domesticity: A visual narrative of domestic responses to war in Iraq. Exhibition of the maps and visuals produced as part of this project will be exhibited at the LSE Middle East Centre between 3rd of April and 12th of May and will appear online as an archive on the 19th of March 2023 on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

Sana is 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. Sana is on the Advisory Board for an Office for Student (OfS) funded project called Generation Delta (2022-2026) nurturing the future of female BAME professors. She is an advisor for the Global Doctoral Program in Spatial Arts, part of the O. P. Jindal Global University, Delhi - India.