Elin Nicholson is currently a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-18) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, researching refugees and cultural production in Australia. Having spent two years living in the Mashreq (especially Israel/Palestine, Jordan and Syria) and becoming proficient in both colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic, Elin completed her doctoral dissertation on contemporary Palestinian theatre as cultural resistance against both the Israeli military occupation and the more conservative elements of Palestinian society, in 2014. Her book based on this doctoral dissertation should be completed by the end of 2015. Elin’s current research focuses on refugee theatre in Melbourne and Victoria as creating ‘exceptional spaces’ in a revised version of Agamben’s ‘state of exception’. She is investigating the extent to which spatial practices of theatre can enable cultural resistance against a neoliberal government with strict policies against refugee communities.