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 failure, mobility, security, borders and technology. 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 I have examined the long-standing relationships between war and tourism. My current work examines the way that failure is being made productive in the global register. My research interests include the following:

• Productive Failure: My current research project examines the way failure is made productive in the global resgister as a way to respond to pressing crises. It draws out the 'toxic positivity' of this narrative of failure, and traces the effects and consequences of rampant optimism when it is deployed by global leaders, managers and policy-makers. This is contrasted with a very different 'archive of the already-failed' which turns to the way populations have always made do in the ruins of productivity and progress.
• Borders, Technology, Security: I have been 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; issues of automation, circulation and mobility; and the connected mobilities of tourism, terrorism, humanitarianism and migration. 
• Tourism, Militarism, Everyday Life: My 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 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) 
• 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 work has examined the encounters that tourists have in sites of war, war exhibitions and war museums, and I have been 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