About
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, with affiliations in the Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies and the International Cultural Studies Program. My teaching and research interests are located at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and transnational Middle East politics, focusing on issues of gender, technology, surveillance, and visual culture. I am a recipient of the 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program, and was a visiting scholar at Abu Dhabi University and the University of Qatar from January to June 2017. My work has been published or is forthcoming in the European Journal of International Relations, Security Dialogue, Contemporary Political Theory, Globalizations, and the Journal of Critical Globalization Studies. I am also 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 project, Optics of Capture: Platform Desires in an Age of Intervention, considers how digital infrastructures and the production of user-generated content in the Middle East are appropriated by states, markets, and international organizations alongside gendered logics and practices of securitization and intervention to produce novel geographies of women’s rights, sexual violence, and political participation. My second major research project, for which I completed six months of fieldwork in 2017, examines the spatial and scalar politics of global and local surveillance and securitization as part of the Gulf States’ massive existing and anticipatory entertainment and leisure infrastructures, and how the investment in entertainment technologies, technologies of security, and the proliferation of artificial landscapes for leisure and living reflect novel attempts at creating totalizing conditions for material, technical, geological, social and political convergence.
My third area of research looks at the use of crowdfunding platforms to finance extra-state violence, and how this phenomenon is giving rise to contemporary shifts in interpretations of domestic and international laws of war. As part of this work, I've written about North American and European civilians who use crowdfunding to engage in combat operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and how these platforms congeal new geopolitical networks in the authorizing of individuals to determine their own singular forms of enmity.
Since 2016, I have been a core research collaborator with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences' Working Group on Critical Security Studies in the Arab Region, and contribute to the group's thematic focus on technologies of in/security. In 2017, we held our first Summer Institute on Critical Security Studies in Beirut for graduate students and junior scholars in the region, and will hold the Second Summer Institute in June 2018.
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.