IAS Friends and Fellows Coffee Morning

On Tuesday 13th October we will be hosting an IAS Friends and Fellows Coffee Morning, where we will welcome current IAS Residential Fellows Dr Pedro Oliveira & Wangui Maina.

Please feel free to book using the button below, to come along and join us for an informal in-person gathering at International House with coffee and cakes to meet our Fellows, all are welcome.

Dr Pedro Oliveira, Universität der Künste Berlin

Pedro Oliveira is a sound artist and researcher working across performance, installation, and writing. His work investigates how listening shapes and is shaped by technological infrastructures, with a focus on voice and migration. Through a poetic-technical approach, he explores sonic media as sites where distinct modes of listening are produced and disrupted, tracing how they are encoded in cultural and institutional frameworks to regulate subjectivity and reconfigure relations between identity and difference.

His previous research was an artistic and media-analytical study of the so-called „dialect recognition software“ in use by the German Migration authorities since 2017 in case of undocumented asylum seekers. This work was exhibited and performed at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, European Media Art Festival, Send/Receive Festival, CTM Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museo del Mare di Palermo, Festival Novas Frequências, Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Max-Planck Institute, among others.

During their IAS Fellowship, Dr Silva Vieira de Oliveira will be collaborating with Dr Courtney N. Reed from the Institute for Creative Futures.

Wangui Maina, Finding Me Community

Wangui Maina is the Founder and CEO of Finding Me Community (FMC), a youth-led organisation embedding preventive, peer-led mental health systems across 33 public universities in East and Central Africa. Her work sits at the intersection of public health, higher education, community psychology, and African philosophy, advancing SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) and SDG 4 (Quality Education) through culturally grounded, student-owned models of care.

Wangui's leadership is rooted in lived experience. While studying economics at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, she experienced severe anxiety within a structurally overwhelmed counselling system one of four counsellors serving over 30,000 students. That encounter with institutional failure became the foundation of her life's work.

During their IAS Fellowship, Wangui will be collaborating with Dr Jessica Robles from the Department of Communication and Media.