Dr Sharri Plonski

Discretionary Award 2025-26

Material Crimes

With Maia Holtermann Entwistle

Material Crimes toys with “true crime” storytelling to uncover the “crimes” of infrastructure. It focuses on experiences of and struggles over infrastructure among marginalised communities. To bring these stories to diverse audiences, the project consists of 10 podcast episodes, 4 micro sound-art exhibitions placed in public sites (a post office, hospital, train station, and court), and 3 community listening events co-hosted with local organisations.

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Biography

Sharri Plonski is a senior lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary University of London. She is a product of multiple transgenerational colonialities that link the practices of conquest, empire, settlement and migration in Eastern Europe, Palestine, Canada and the UK. Her work, which is concerned with settler colonial relations, anti-colonial struggles, border dynamics and material infrastructures, is primarily anchored in the case of Palestine/Israel and its regional and global relations. She is currently working on a project that investigates the colonial and capitalist entanglements of Israel’s trade and transit infrastructures (as PI on an ESRC New Investigator Grant) and the materials that undergird Israel’s ‘normalisation’ project. She recently made a podcast about the material crimes of a ‘train to nowhere’ and realised there are better ways to tell stories than academic articles.

Biographical details correct as of 17.12.25

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