Cydney Phillip

Burden of Toxic Air in Black and Diaspora Communities Across London

Cydney Phillip is an interdisciplinary researcher and public engagement advocate. Her work is primarily concerned with the entanglements between art and activism, particularly in relation to issues of racial, social, and environmental injustice. She received her PhD in 2023 from Goldsmiths, University of London, before beginning a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. Her doctoral project, which forms the basis of her first monograph, engaged with the ways in which contemporary writers, photographers, and hip-hop artists from the U.S. Gulf Coast respond to the ecological repercussions of plantation slavery. Outside of academia, Cydney works with charities and non-profit organisations to design and deliver educational programmes that provide free access to the creative arts and spark collective inquiry. During her SAS fellowship, Cydney will work with communities in some of London’s most polluted areas to explore the ways in which local artists and activists are deploying storytelling as a public health intervention, especially in response to the disproportionate burden of toxic air on Black and diaspora communities across the city. Combining photovoice and oral history methods, this project will investigate how and why communities affected by environmental racism are using arts-based methods to seek policy change, whilst also identifying the support that grassroots storytellers need to accelerate their interventions.