Research Interests

Experimental geopolitics and contemporary art practice

This area of work forms the main current focus for my research and grows out of an interest in the manner in which geopolitics is encountered, negotiated and contested in everyday life and in cultural production. I am interested in the following sets of questions:

1. How are contemporary artists and curators addressing geopolitical issues? My research engages with the work of artists who have, for example, produced alternative mappings of contemporary geopolitical conflicts, conducted international border crossings as art works, and set up live art installations to explore the blurred boundaries between video games and remote control war. It also examines exhibitions that have sought to stage geopolitics, for example by simulating surveillance and security practices and imagining how the Iraq war might in future be commemorated.

2. How do artistic and curatorial practices participate in the political, cultural and material construction of space? My work examines how the techniques of painting, photomontage, installation and performance and particular curatorial strategies create spaces of representation, embodiment and experience that intersect with the constitution of public space and global political order.

3. How can we theorize the implications of these practices for geopolitics? Here my work focuses on elaborating the connections between what I term the experimental geopolitics found in contemporary art practice and efforts to develop alternative modes of geopolitical intervention, for example in peace work and other kinds of activism. I identify such connections in concerns with embodiment, with technology and in questions of visibility. I am interested in how an engagement with the experimental sensibility evident in contemporary art can provide a means to enrich and reflect critically upon alternative geopolitical practices.

4. What are the implications of artistic and curatorial interventions in geopolitics for broader public understanding and engagement in issues of war and peace? I am particularly interested in art works and interventions that involve participants and record the manner of their participation. Here my research explores how artistic interventions may elicit and prompt reflection on the complex issues surrounding contemporary conflicts. My research also considers the ways in which art may participate in broader public debates around war and peace, for example in relation to anti-war activism, the effects of violence and practices of memorialization.

This research agenda is the focus on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the academic year 2011-2012, awarded for the project Art and War: Responses to Iraq, which considers how artists and art spaces in the UK have responded to the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation. The project encompasses archival research on art works and exhibitions, interviewing of artists and curators and public engagement activities.

The geopolitics of global health

From 2002 to 2004 I worked outside academia, managing a policy research and development programme at the Nuffield Trust exploring the emerging interface between global health, foreign policy and security. This formed the focus of my research on joining UCL in 2004. Here I have researched what is often called the securitization of global health, or the move to conceptualize and manage global health issues in terms of security. This work explores the shift towards framing and managing global health issues such as HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases as matters of security and the implications of renewed interest among military and security agencies in global health. Drawing on governmentality and political-economic approaches, my work seeks to clarify the geopolitical stakes and dimensions of global health, arguing that these pervade contemporary global health initiatives but also work their way through the politics of national health. My recent work considers the implications of the global financial crisis for global health and the process of rationalization under way in the international response to HIV/AIDS.

Russian nationalism and geopolitical theory

My graduate and post-doctoral research examined the implications of Russian nationalism for the geopolitics of the post-Soviet states. Following the collapse of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and amid concerns about the stability of the region, my research examined the claims, strategies and dynamics of a resurgent Russian nationalism and its relationship to post-Soviet state building. The research highlighted the radical implications of Russian nationalism and the manner in which nationalist intellectuals were drawing on classical Western theories of geopolitics, but also identified factors limiting the prospects for Russian nationalism to precipitate wider instability in the post-Soviet region.