Research & Outputs
My work is located within critical security studies. I research security in digital spaces, focusing in particular on gender, militarisation, and ways of knowing. I sometimes publish on teaching, too. My current work focuses on social media use by militaries and arms companies, asking questions around militarisation, identity and representation.
Current work
My work at the moment examines security - and sometimes identity - in digital space. For this, I have obtained a grant from the University of Gloucestershire Small Grants Fund and was selected to participate in the British Academy/CIFAR UK/Canada knowledge exchange symposium on the subject of security. As part of this, I co-organised (with Holly Ann Garnett and Jeffrey Whyte) a workshop held 10 and 11 September 2021 titled 'Security, Truth and the Crisis of Democracy'. In December 2022 I participated in the International Studies Association International Security Studies Section Pay it Forward mentoring programme for early-career women in security.
PhD work
My PhD examined how UK state identity is constructed in online British mainstream media representations of the 2011 conflict in Libya. I was awarded my PhD in 2020. Using a discourse-theoretic approach, I drew on David Campbell's work Writing Security to show that this conflict is represented as a threat in myriad ways, re/producing the identity of the UK as a state in the process. In this case identity constructions rely upon an identity/difference binary which draws heavily upon gendered-Orientalism to code the UK as positive (moral, enlightened, a leader) and Libya as negative (violent, backward, tempting, childlike). I am - gently! - producing three papers out of my PhD materials. The first of these can now be found at the link above.
