I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, with affiliations in the Department of Women’s Studies, the Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies, and the International Cultural Studies Program. My research centers on three areas: the globalization of security and surveillance technologies; media infrastructures and transnational networks of violence; and the relationship between space, security and design. I am a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program, and have done fieldwork in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Lebanon. I am also a core member of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences' Working Group on Critical Security Studies in the Arab Region and the Security in Context (SiC) research and pedagogy initiative. My work has been published or is forthcoming in Security Dialogue, Critical Studies on Security, the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Review, Contemporary Political Theory, and Globalizations. I am currently an Associate Editor for the journal International Political Sociology, and am on the International Advisory Board of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
My first book, Intimate Capture: Security, Desire, and the Middle East in the Data Imperium (under contract with Duke University Press) examines the materialization of novel regimes of control at the nexus of global imperial formations and contemporary modes of data capture. Beginning with the ways in which the ‘Middle East’ is constructed as an object of market, military and humanitarian intervention, Intimate Capture takes a broad view of global mutations in security and surveillance practices produced in and through connective media infrastructures beyond the putative boundaries of the region, and toward questions concerning the emergence of new architectures of scientific expertise, global racisms, and new modes of perception and experience (re)produced through the proliferation of ‘democratizing’ technologies. My second major research project explores how the spatial and scalar politics of design and engineering have become themselves forms of political intervention, where politics is no longer defined through forms of governance and what is governable, but instead through unending beta-tests and disruptions that have become the new metrics of institutional success.
Since 2017, I’ve served as a core instructor for the ACSS Beirut-based Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies for graduate students and junior scholars. At the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, I teach courses on global politics, international relations, Middle East politics, political theory, feminist theory, gender and sexuality, U.S. foreign policy, and the politics of media.