General Research Interests:

My research engages with a number of contemporary debates in International Relations, International Political Sociology and beyond, most notably around issues of difference, mobility, security, travel, visuality, governmentality, biopolitics, materiality, technology, practice and power. My earlier work explores the relevance of cultural and visual artifacts (e.g. contemporary travel writing, museum exhibits, photographs, art, war films) to world politics, and argues that the cultural realm tells as much about International Relations as the official documents usually privileged in this context. More recently, my research has been exploring the following themes:

• Tourism, Militarism, Everyday Life: My new book Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) offers a genealogy of how the worlds of leisure intersect with the worlds of violence in unexpected ways, and how global politics needs to acknowledge the constitutive circuits of leisure that support prevailing geopolitical imaginaries. I am particularly interested in the relationship between leisure, recreation and resilience in modern military culture and beyond, and have recently published work examining the relationship between resilience and leisure in the US Army. More broadly, I have explored the securitization of tourist sites in the aftermath of 9/11, and how sites of leisure are securitized and militarized in unexpected ways (e.g. the London Olympics) 
• Borders, Technology, Security: I am involved in a number of collaborative projects exploring the role of security technologies at border sites. Of particular interest for me is how failure operates through technology, and how different actors (e.g. border guards, scientists and engineers, regular and irregular migrants, security agents) have competing understandings of failure and its consequences. I have published jointly-authored work tracing the development of specific border technologies for detecting CBRNE materials, and I am currently working on issues of automation, circulation and mobility. Given the recent increase in migration across the EU, I am currently working on a larger project connecting the mobilities of tourism, terrorism and migration. 
• War, Representation, Surveillance: Drawing from my earlier work on visuality and representation, I am interested in how war is represented across visual and cultural realms (e.g. in museums, photography, art, films). My recent work has examined the encounters that tourists have in sites of war, war exhibitions and war museums, and I am currently involved in museum efforts to think critically and creatively about how to represent the Troubles in Northern Ireland. More recently, I have become interested in how visualities of war operate at the more-than-representational register, for example, how visual technologies are productive of war and conflict (e.g. drones, surveillance, governmentality). 

Undergraduate and Masters Teaching:

My general teaching areas are International Relations, Global Politics, Visual Culture, Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies and Contemporary Social and Political Theory. I contribute to International Relations teaching at all levels in the School and I run my own third year module entitled War, Visual Culture and Surveillance which looks at representations of war (e.g. photography, film, museums, media), new modes of surveillance (e.g. drones) and the role of visual technologies in the execution of war. I am the pathway convener for the taught MA in International Relations, and I contribute to School modules on Contemporary Security as well as cross-Faculty MA teaching on Visual Politics. I am also the new pathway convener for the taught MA in Global Security and Borders which starts September 2016.

Areas of PhD Supervision:
I am happy to supervise PhD students in the general areas of International Relations, Critical Security Studies, Visual Culture, Mobility, Materiality, Poststructuralism, Critical War Studies, Urban Politics and Cultural Studies. More specifically, I can supervise projects exploring the relationship between International Relations and the Cultural and Visual realms, either those focusing on the representational register (e.g. those analysing film, travel writing, the media, contemporary literature, museums, photography, art and performance) or those focusing on practice and everyday life (e.g. the Olympics, urban security, travel and tourism). Some of the current projects I am supervising include:

• The Practice-Network of EU Border Technologies
• Re-imagining the Troubles Exhibit at the Ulster Museum
• Emotion, Affect and Fear in post 9/11 Everyday Spaces
• Memory, Ethics and the Libyan Intervention
• Female Suicide Bombers: Gender, Ethnicity and mass media