About

NICOLE SUNDAY GROVE is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with affiliations in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies, and the International Cultural Studies Program. Her research examines the circulatory violence of global infrastructure and contemporary forms of data capture through questions of design, affect and aesthetics, and how we can engage abolition as an organizing ethic for a politics of response.

Grove is the recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program, and has done fieldwork in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Lebanon. She is also part 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, where she leads the ‘Endemic Infrastructures’ research cluster. Her work has been published in Security Dialogue, Critical Studies on Security, the European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Studies Review, Contemporary Political Theory, and Globalizations. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, an open-source, peer-reviewed journal that examines misinformation and disinformation from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Her first book, Intimate Capture: Security, Desire, and the Coloniality of Computation (under contract with Duke University Press) looks at how control is expressed and constituted in visual, sensorial and infrastructural fields of experience produced through novel forms of data-driven security practices. It centers questions of coloniality and intimacy as preceding these interventions in ways that reproduce historical relations of sexualized and racialized vulnerability and the determination of who or what is a threat.  The scene setting for this inquiry is the amorphous shift from what was previously called the ‘War on Terror,’ to the multi-scalar matrices of population targeting and new forms of data capture and analytics that produce the ‘Middle East’ as something technological, aesthetic and libidinal rather than geographic, discrete, or cultural, and where the conditions of technological emergence are bent toward the dream of total environmental management through total environmental awareness. Intimate Capture takes a planetary view of these global mutations in security and surveillance practices produced in and through connective computational cartographies 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 creation of data that are simultaneously made a form of currency, a capacity for advocacy, and an indispensable resource for enduring regimes of control, exploitation, and dispossession.

Since 2017, Grove has 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, she teaches 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.