Annabel Talco

It was with the help of the Pantyfedwen Trust that I was able to complete my MSc in Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), graduating in December 2022 with a Distinction. My time at LSE not only completely transformed my worldview and equipped me with skills and knowledge that will shape my future, but it introduced me to friends from all over the world that I will have for life.

My essays explored and debated a wide range of topics, from the dark corners of the online, woman-hating ‘manosphere’ and the layered forms of racism which drive anti-Muslim hatred in the far-right, to the colonial global order which dictates Europe’s abhorrent war against migrants and dominates the design and deployment of humanitarianism and international law. A particular highlight was an essay which used Christina Sharpe’s praxis of ‘wake work’ to explore the potentially anticolonial afterlives of the April 18, 2015 shipwreck — a tragedy which saw 700 to 1100 migrants die in the Mediterranean Sea as an outcome of European ‘borderization’. My analysis of the recovered boat, migrant bodies and their belongings as archive received a mark of 90, and I hope to have it published in the new year. 

My dissertation synthesised art, testimony, reports, secondary literature and theory to investigate the disfigurement of the Palestinian body under Israeli violence, itself linked theoretically and conceptually to the ‘dismemberment’ of Palestine under Zionism. Using the Israel Defence Force’s ‘shoot to injure’ practice and its proliferation of amputation in Gaza as my starting point, I sought to excavate the meaning of the amputated, phantom and prosthetic limb (and their diverse manifestations) in Palestinian society.

I spent most of 2023 backpacking South East Asia and Central and South America both “solo” and with a friend I met at LSE. Since then, I have been working at a social impact educational technology company as a Policy and Impact Analyst. I am still very much considering continuing my research on Palestine at a Doctoral level in the future, but for now want to work on building my skills in the workplace. It is again with an immense sense of gratitude that I thank the Pantyfedwen Trust for their support in facilitating my learning at LSE — it would not have been possible without them!