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Btihaj obtained a BA (Hons) with First Class in Media Studies and Computing Science from London South Bank University, an MA with Distinction in Digital Media from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science. She has taught sociology at the LSE and previously worked with media organisations specialising in factual programming about the Middle East.

• New media and digital technologies
• Subjectivity, identity, embodiment and singularity
• (bio)ethics
• Politics of borders, immigration, citizenship, and security
• Continental philosophy and psychology  

Ajana, B. (forthcoming) Biopolitics of Biometrics: Immigration, Citizenship and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ajana, B. (2010) ‘Recombinant Identities: Biometrics and Narrative Bioethics’,Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, vol.7:237-258. DOI 10.1007/s11673-010-9228-4.  http://www.springerlink.com/content/c2w33472648436x3/

Ajana, B. (2009) ‘Review of Another Paradise’, a play by Sayan Kent, Kali Theatre Production 2009, Journal of Identity in the Information Society. October 2009.

Ajana, B. (2008) ‘In defence of poststructural ethics in sociological praxis: Derrida’, Enquire, vol.1, no.1, June 2008.

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/shared/shared_enquire/PDFs/Ajana_B.pdf

Ajana, B. (2007) ‘Rethinking Community through Literature’, Journal for Cultural Research, vol.11, no.2.

Ajana, B. (2006). ‘Immigration Interrupted’. Journal for Cultural Research, vol.10, no.3.

Selected conference papers

‘Biometrics and Recombinant Identities’, British Sociological Association Annual Conference, 6-8 April 2011.

‘Re-ontologising Danger’, ESRC Workshop: Problematising Danger, King’s College London, 12-22 February 2011. 

‘Ethics and Cultural Minorities’, Ethical Aspects of Inclusion in the Information Society, European Commission, Brussels, 29 October 2007.

‘Homo Carded: Exception and ID Cards’, Always look on the dark side? The biopolitics of life and death, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 17-21 April 2007. 

‘Porous Security’, Biometric Identification Technology Ethics (BITE) Project, European Commission, Brussels, 22-23 February 2007.

‘‘I’ is a Border’, Embodiment and the State, University of Southern Denmark, Middelfart, 27-28 October 2006.  

‘The Ethics of the Whatever in Cultural Studies’, Contexts, Fields, Positions – Situating Cultural Research, University of East London, 25-26 May 2006.

Research

Btihaj’s current research interests are concerned with the intersection between technology, body, identity/identification, aesthetics and ethics. She is currently working on a book project under the title Biopolitics of Biometrics: Immigration, Citizenship and Identity. The book explores the political and ethical implications of biometric technology by drawing upon the case of the recent schemes of identity cards and other related developments.

Teaching 

Btihaj teaches on the MA programme in Digital Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities and contributes to the MA programme in Culture and Creative Industries at CMCI. She also teaches an optional module on embodiment and digital media.

Btihaj will be supervising PhD projects in the areas of dance and ontology, bioculture and posthumanisim, and inter/trans-mediality and the body.

She is interested in supervising students working on similar areas as well as students engaged with the fields of biopolitics and bioethics from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective.

tbc