Dr Sana Murrani
Lecturer in Architecture History and Theory

Profile

Biography

With a background in architecture and urban design, Sana has developed an interdisciplinary research practice grounded in critical spatial practice, creative cartography, and participatory methodologies. Her research examines how people remember, inhabit, and remake places and material heritage shaped by political violence, migration, environmental change, and colonial legacies. Through mapping, storytelling, archival research, visual practice, and collaborative forms of knowledge-making, she explores questions of memory, belonging, spatial justice, and the politics of place.

Sana's research has focused particularly on the UK, Europe, and the Middle East, while her applied creative practice and trauma-informed methodologies have also informed collaborative projects in Southeast Asia. She works with refugees, marginalised and displaced communities, interdisciplinary teams, local and international community organisations, NGOs, and UN agencies. Her work has contributed to debates across architecture, heritage studies, migration studies, and human and urban geography. She is the author of Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq (2003–2023) (Bloomsbury, 2024). She has led and collaborated on projects funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the British Council, the NIHR, the European Cultural Foundation, and the LSE Middle East Centre.

Career

Before joining York School of Architecture, Sana was Associate Professor of Spatial Practice and Programme Lead for the Master of Architecture at the University of Plymouth. She held leadership roles in research, doctoral training across the arts and humanities, research methodologies, and architectural education, and served as Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Trustee of Devon and Cornwall Refugee Support, and has served as External Examiner for the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at the Development Planning Unit, University College London, and the MA Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies programme at the University of London.

Research

Overview

Sana's research is grounded in an interdisciplinary triangulation of critical spatial practice, creative cartography, and trauma-informed methodologies. It explores how power, loss, and future imaginaries become embedded in architectures and geographies of displacement and recovery. Through multimodal creative storytelling and participatory approaches, she examines the politics of remembering and forgetting in spaces shaped by violence, migration, and environmental change. Engaging with heritage as a living and contested process, her work contributes to global debates on spatial justice, memory, and collaborative forms of knowledge-making with marginalised, displaced, and Indigenous communities.

Her creative and applied research practice draws on participatory action co-design and creative deep mapping, informed by spatial thinking, memory-work, and speculative cartographic practices such as weaving, layering, tracing, and imaginative drawing. Through these approaches, she foregrounds co-creation and the ethical dimensions of mapping as a means of recovery, resistance, and spatial justice.

Projects

ELEVATE: Women's Climate Resilience in Iraq (2025 – 2026)

British Council-funded project exploring creative and participatory approaches to strengthening women's climate resilience in Iraq.

CAREscape: Climate-Adaptive Reimaginings for Enhancing Healthcare Spaces (2025 – 2026)

British Council-funded collaboration exploring relationships between wellbeing, healthcare environments, climate adaptation, and creative placemaking in the Philippines.

Ruptured Atlas: Creative Mapping of Yazidi Geographies (2024 – 2025)

AHRC Impact Fellowship exploring displacement, survival, memory, and return through creative mapping with Yazidi communities in Iraq and the diaspora.

Rupturing Architecture (2021– 2024)

British Academy and British Institute for the Study of Iraq funded research examining spatial practices of refuge in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, culminating in an exhibition, archive, and the Bloomsbury monograph Rupturing Architecture.

Creative Mapping of Home (2018 – 2019)

Participatory mapping project developed with refugees in the UK, exploring memory, belonging, and recovery through creative and visual methodologies.

Supervision

Sana has supervised PhD projects to completion and welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers interested in

• Architectural history and theory
• Critical heritage and memory studies
• Migration, displacement, and refuge
• Creative cartography and mapping methodologies
• Participatory and community-engaged research
• Middle Eastern architecture and urbanism
• Spatial justice in the built environment
• Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to architecture
• Creative research methods and practice-based research

Publications

Selected publications

Murrani, S. (2024) Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq (2003–2023). London: Bloomsbury.

Murrani, S., Bumstead, K., Paris, Z., Ismael, G.M., Rasho, J.B. and Joqey, O.K. (2025) Ruptured Atlas: Trauma-Informed Approach to Spatial Storytelling for Survivors of Genocide (The Case for Yazidis in Iraq);, LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series.

Merie, U. and Murrani, S. (2024) Baghdad Behind Walls: Mapping Urban Heritage for Spatial Justice;, Middle East Journal, 77(3–4), pp. 306–328.

Murrani, S. and Lloyd, H. (2023) Mapping Home, Memory and Spatial Recovery in Forced Displacement;, Social & Cultural Geography, 24(8), pp. 1305–1323.

Murrani, S. (2023) Mapping the Unseen: Harnessing Indigenous Knowledge through Participatory Mapping to Address Displacement and Housing Challenges in Post- Invasion Iraq;, LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series.

Murrani, S. (2019) Contingency and Plasticity: The Dialectical Re-construction of the Concept of Home in Displacement;, Culture & Psychology, 26(2), pp. 173–186.

Murrani, S. (2016) Baghdad’s Thirdspace: Between Liminality, Anti-Structures and Territorial Mappings, Cultural Dynamics, 28(2), pp. 189–220.

Teaching

Other teaching

Sana's teaching connects architectural history and theory with contemporary questions of heritage, migration, climate change, social justice, and spatial practice. She has taught across undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programmes in architecture, including design and history and theory modules, as well as heritage studies, interdisciplinary research methods, and research ethics. She is particularly interested in helping students develop critical approaches to architecture and the built environment through historical inquiry, applied theory, creative design methods, and independent research.

External activities

Overview

Advisory Roles and Professional Service

• Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE Middle East Centre (2024 – 2026).
• Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
• Academic Advisory Board Member, Migrant Futures Institute, Goldsmiths, University of London.
• Advisory Group Member, Livingmaps Network.
• Trustee, Devon and Cornwall Refugee Support.

Invited Lectures and Keynotes

Sana regularly delivers invited lectures, keynote presentations, and public talks on architecture, heritage, displacement, migration, creative cartography, and spatial justice. Recent invitations include:

2026

• Reconstruction for the People, Transitional Justice | Human Rights | Community Engagement, organised by the School of Geography at University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, at the University of Oxford, 2 – 3 July 2026.
• Invited expert for a workshop at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg to co-establish an ethical framework for participation and public engagement in the Virtual House of the Rejected project, led by Dr Myriam Dalal (Goldsmiths) and Professor Thomas Cauvin (Luxembourg).

2025

• Evening Lecture Series at the School of Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield, 4 November 2025. Talk title: Maps, Memory and Spatial Justice: Stories from Iraq.
• Panellist at the How Maps Win or Lose Wars, part of the Secret Maps events at the British Library, 31 October 2025.
• Panellist at the Challenging Maps and Exploration Symposium, The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 30 October 2025, link to recording.
• Speaker at the AHRC Impact Accelerator Account Southwest of England, Amplifying Global Majority Voices through Arts and Humanities Research, with the Ruptured Atlas project, Borderless Cartographies: Mapping Survival Displacement and Resistance with the Yazidi Community in Iraq, AHRC/Swansea University, 30 April 2025.
• Speaker as part of a roundtable discussion on Conceptualising ‘the South’ in response to Displacement, at the Southern Responses to Displacement Conference, UCL-Migration Research Unit, London, 11 March 2025.
• Invited book launch at The British Academy, British Institute for the Study of Iraq, for Rupturing Architecture, 12 February 2025. Link to the YouTube recording.
• Invited book talk, Rupturing Architecture, at the Refugee Studies Centre, The University of Oxford, 29 January 2025. Link to the SoundCloud recording.
• Invited book launch at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, Rupturing Architecture. A conversation around Spatial Practices of Refuge, 15 January 2025. Link to the YouTube recording.

2024

• Keynote speaker at the launch of the Migrant Futures Institute at Goldsmiths, University of London, 9 December 2024.
• Guest speaker at the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies, SOAS University of London, Homemaking in fragile environments, 14 November 2024.
• Invited book launch (public event) for Rupturing Architecture at the LSE Middle East Centre (in addition to a seminar to research students about creative methods of practice), 13 November 2024. Link to the SoundCloud recording.
• Panellist and invited speaker at the UCL Urban Lab, Urbicide and Horizons for City Re-making, 23 October 2024.
• Chair of discussion at Theatre Royal Plymouth at the Perception Gap event with Performer and Writer, Patrice Naiambana organised by the Decolonial Salon, 4 October 2024.
• Speaker at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg University. Narratives of Power, Memory and Place in Post 2003 Iraq, 16 October 2024.
• Panellist and invited speaker at the LSE Women, Peace and Security Research Centre, LSE Summer of Research Culture Event, Gender-based violence in the Middle East, 24 of July 2024.
• Guest speaker at Writing Displacements: Opening displacement-to-displacement conversations of solidarities, thinking across histories and geographies, movements, time and space. Roundtable discussion organised by UCL Refuge in a Moving World Network and hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, 10th of July 2024.

2023

• Panellist at the Black Atlantic event as part of the Against Apartheid project, 22nd-23rd November 2023, curated by Radical Ecology Studio in collaboration with The Box, KARST and Devonport Market Hall, Plymouth.
• Panellist at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference, 31st of August, London at the main RGS building, Home and migration: a conversation across geographies of place-making. Talk: Mapmaking as Homing.
• Speaker at the Make Maps, Not War: Cartography on the frontline series organised by the Livingmaps Network, 21st of June, Pushkin House, London. Talk: Seeking Refuge in the Folds of Maps.
• Speaker and convener at the Generation Delta workshops (OfS funding), University of Plymouth, 27 th and 29 th of June. Talk: From Gen X to Gen Delta, with Love.
• Keynote for Ruptured Domesticity Exhibition launch, hosted and funded by the LSE Middle East Centre and accompanied by a Public Talk on the opening night of the exhibition, 3rd of April to 12th of May 2023. Link to the SoundCloud recording.

Editorial and Peer Review Activities

Sana reviews research funding applications, journal articles, books, and research proposals across architecture, geography, heritage, migration, and the humanities.

Activities include:

• AHRC Catalyst Fund Reviewer
• Member of the Commissioning Panel for the Local Policy Innovation
• Partnerships (LPIPs), a collaboration between ESRC, AHRC, and Innovate UK (UKRI).
• Reviewer for City.
• Reviewer for Home Cultures.
• Reviewer for Journal of Refugee Studies.
• Reviewer for Migration and Society.
• Reviewer for Third World Quarterly.
• Reviewer for Routledge Architecture.
• Former member of the ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund Peer Review
  College.

External Examining and Doctoral Examination

• External Examiner, MA Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies, University of London (2025 – 2026).
• Former External Examiner, MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD), University College London (2021 – 2025).
• In addition to examining more than 15 PhD theses at the University of Plymouth, I have served as external examiner for doctoral students at institutions including University College London, Durham University, and the University of Baghdad.

Public Engagement

Sana's research has informed public, cultural, and policy discussions through collaborations with museums, archives, charities, NGOs, and international organisations. It has been featured by organisations and media outlets including PBS NewsHour, The Conversation, The Sociological Review, Jadaliyya, The New Arab, and the LSE Middle East Centre, and has contributed to public exhibitions, policy dialogues, and community-led projects in the UK and internationally.