Qualifications

  • BA Hons Otago
  • MLitt, PhD St Andrews

Profile

I am a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. Before my appointment at Victoria University of Wellington, I was an Economic and Social Research Council Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where I also completed my PhD.

My work falls at the intersection between critical theory and international ethics. At the postgraduate level, I teach War and its Aftermath, which uses an experience of war framework to examine how war shapes human bodies, human lives, and human societies. At the undergraduate level, I teach Critical Global Politics, which draws on the work of key critical theorists to examine oppression, vulnerability, emancipation and resistance.

Research interests

My research has three main foci: critical exegesis of the work of Gillian Rose, an important but neglected British philosopher; international political theory; and critical pedagogies. My work on Gillian Rose emphasises the contribution that Rose’s radical Hegelianism makes to debates in political theory, arguing that it offers important and provocative lessons for the contemporary Left. My engagement with international political theory highlights the importance of the micropolitical in thinking ethically, drawing attention to our vulnerable subjectivity and relationality. My pedagogical research sketches a relational pedagogy that promotes a counter-cultural embrace of ambiguity, vulnerability, and love, arguing that it cannot co-exist with societal desires for certainty, self-preservation, and invulnerability.

I am interested in supervising research students working on international political thought and critical theory broadly conceived, including topics on vulnerability, mourning, trauma, and suffering. I particularly enjoy interdisciplinary co-supervision, and have co-supervised students in conjunction with scholars from Philosophy, Art History, Wai-te-ata Press, Education, Media Studies and Sociology as well as from within Political Science and International Relations.

Publications

  • ‘Recognition reframed: Reconfiguring recognition in global politics’, in Steven Roach (ed), Handbook on Critical International Relations (Edward Elgar, forthcoming).
  • ‘Pedagogical micro-communities: Sites of relationality, sites of transformation’ in Jamie Frueh (ed) Pedagogical Journeys Through World Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20305-4_3.
  • ‘Emotions and the Everyday: Power, Resistance and Ambivalence’, Journal of International Political Theory, Vol. 15, Issue 2 (2019), pp. 261-268.
  • ‘“The tree is really rooted in the sky”: Beside difficulty in Gillian Rose’s political theory’, in Joshua B. Davis, Misrecognitions: Gillian Rose and the Task of Political Theology (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2018), pp. 87-106.
  • ‘Critical International Ethics: Knowing/Acting Differently’, in Brent J. Steele and Eric Heinz (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Ethics and International Relations (Routledge, 2018), pp. 160-172.
  • Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State and World, co-edited with Patrick Hayden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
  • 'Unsettling Pedagogy: Recognition, Vulnerability, and the International' in Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick (eds.), Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State and World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 25-44.
  • Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick, 'Recognition and the International: Meanings, Limits, Manifestations' in Patrick Hayden and Kate Schick (eds.), Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters between State and World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 1-22.
  • 'Re-cognizing recognition: Gillian Rose’s ‘radical Hegel’ and vulnerable recognition', Telos (Winter, 2015), pp. 87-105.
  • 'Gillian Rose and Vulnerable Judgement' in Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick (eds.), The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 43-61.
  • Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick, 'Introduction', in Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick (eds.), The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1-24.
  • (co-edited with Amanda Russell Beattie) The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  • Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
  • 'Against Overcorrection: Risking the Universal', in J.L. Shaw and Michael Hemmingsen (eds.), Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Punthi Pustak: Kolkata, 2011), pp. 219-224.
  • Acting out and working through: trauma and (in)security', Review of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2011), pp. 1837-1855.
  • ‘“To lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all truth”: Adorno and International Political Thought’, Journal of International Political Theory , Vol. 5, No. 2 (2009), pp. 138-160.
  • ‘Beyond rules: A critique of the liberal human rights regime’, International Relations, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2006), pp. 345-351.

Awards

  • 2014 Early Career Research Excellence Award (Victoria University of Wellington).
  • 2011 Most Popular Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Victoria Awards).
  • 2008 Economic and Social Research Council Fellowship, UK (ESRC, held at University of St Andrews).
  • 2005 NZ Top Achiever PhD Scholarship (NZ Tertiary Education Commission, held at University of St Andrews).
  • 2003 Commonwealth Scholarship (Association of Commonwealth Universities, held at University of St Andrews).