Linka Nowell (Caroline L.A. Wheeler) is a practice-based PhD researcher at Falmouth University working across photography, adornment and material culture. Her doctoral research examines identity negotiation through worn items in portrait photography of Ugandan-hosted refugees from the 1940s onwards, working with dispersed and often overlooked photographic archives.

Focusing on dress and adornment as material evidence, the research considers how migration, provision and imperial systems shape what is worn, recorded and remembered. Through visual analysis, fieldwork and the production of new photographic chapters, the project contributes to the development of a new dress- and adornment-centred archive.

Her family were among the first refugees hosted in Uganda during the Second World War, displaced from Poland to Siberian labour camps and later placed in British colonial East Africa before resettlement in the UK over an eight-year period. Grounded in this second-generation refugee heritage and lived experience across multiple countries, this positionality informs both method and interpretation, situating practice as material and visual enquiry.