Teaching Areas

Political and cultural Geography, critical theory, security studies, borders and territory, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the geography of gender and queer theory.

Research Interests

I am a cultural and political geographer with particular interest in critical perspectives on security, processes of border making, geographies of embodiment, critical cultural analysis and feminist and queer theory. Drawing on my regional expertise in the Middle East, my research examines how the constitution of space and the regulation of quotidian movement in different border-regimes affect disadvantaged communities, particularly in the context of post- and neo-colonial settings, and how security considerations are embedded in such sites to rationalise different forms of direct and structural violence.

I am currently completing a three-year ESRC-funded project entitled “Torture as a Political Technology: A Socio-Political Analysis of the Widespread Use of Torture”. Conducted in collaboration with Prof Hagar Kotef (SOAS) and with the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), and focusing on Israel/Palestine as a case study, this research explores the systematic application of torture as a political tool. It examines how torture methods are deployed to affect the target communities, how it seeks to shape subjects, communal ties, and political relations. This research analyses torture as a phenomenon that extends beyond the exertion of brute violence, as a technology of population control.

Affiliations

I am a fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. Externally, I am a member of the Geography and Geoscience Committee of the Royal Irish Academy and I sit on the Peer Review College of the ESRC and of the Irish Research Counsil Research Grant Review Panel.