22/10/2026
Celebrations are in order for our newest Dr! Congratulations to Indira Lemouchi on successfully passing the PhD viva 🎉
Indira’s PhD thesis titled “Aurientation: Sensing Children’s Eco-Sonic Agencies” advances children’s sonic geographies through creative sound workshops with 7-11 year old children in London schools and community centres. The thesis develops the original concept of ‘aurientation’ to describe children’s experiences of sound as profoundly situated, oriented, and speculatively imagined. Through richly detailed descriptions of sonic encounters, Indira demonstrates how children play and experiment with their environments and their aurientations within them, whether in the midst of intensifying heat waves or in urban allotments lit by the full moon.
Indira’s SeNSS-funded PhD was supervised by Professor Jay Mistry, Professor Henry Stobart and Dr Sasha Engelmann with brilliant input from Professor Harriet Hawkins, and mentored by Dr Amer Kanngieser.
The examiners, who were Professor Oli Mould and Dr Michael Gallagher (Manchester Metropolitan University) praised the vital contributions of the thesis to knowledge on children’s sonic worlds and Indira’s eloquent and ‘song-like’ writing. Warm thanks to Rachael Squire for chairing the viva.
We are delighted to celebrate this fantastic achievement and look forward to seeing the impact of Indira’s future research.
Congratulations again, Dr Lemouchi! 👏
