Nigel Thrift

Sir Nigel John Thrift DL FBA FAcSS FRSGS (born 12 October 1949 in Bath)[1][2] is a British academic and geographer.

[5] Thrift served as Executive Director of Schwarzman Scholars until 2017, and was appointed as Chair of the UK Government's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management in 2018.

His work on time, language, power, representations, and the body has been particularly influential, and it has been suggested that Thrift's career reflects and in some cases spurred substantial intellectual changes in human geography in the 1980s and 1990s.

Non-representational theory is concerned with performative and embodied knowledges and is a radical attempt to wrench the social sciences and humanities out of an over-emphasis on representation and interpretation by moving away from contemplative models of thought and action to those based on practice.

Major themes within non-representational theory include subjectification, space as a verb, technologies of being, embodiment, and play and excess.

Non-representational theory has provoked substantial debate within the field of human geography around the limits of the mediation of our world through language and how we might see, sense, and communicate beyond it.

[17] On 3 December 2014 police used CS spray to tackle protests at the University of Warwick, after a security guard was assaulted[18] (two protestors, including a student were later prosecuted[19]).