Dr Karen Tucker

Personal profile

Seminar Tutor, University of Bristol 2006-2011, Research Associate 2011-2013

Visiting Researcher, Universidad de Concepción, Chile 2009

Research

My research focuses on issues relating to dissent, advocacy and processes of global governance, with a particular emphasis on the politics of knowledge and representation within transnational advocacy and campaigning networks.

My doctoral research focused on transnational advocacy and campaigning work in relation to the World Trade Organisation’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS) and the protection of traditional knowledge and biodiversity.  Building on extensive fieldwork in Switzerland and Peru, I analysed the ways in which participation in the spaces of interaction that have opened up between the broader public and the WTO is structured and limited, and the processes that lead to the marginalisation and erasure of non-Western and non-market-oriented forms of knowledge in this field of global governance. 

Further research is planned into the ways in which contemporary theories and practices of ‘global civil society’ and ‘transnational advocacy’ contribute to the marginalisation and erasure of non-Western forms of knowledge in global governance, and the ways in which these theories and practices can be decolonised.

I have co-convened a number of international events on the global politics of dissent and am the co-editor with Dr Lara Montesinos Coleman of Situating Global Resistance (Routledge, 2012).  Further events on this topic are planned, including a workshop on ‘Discipline, Dissent and Dispossession’ in early 2013, organised in collaboration with researchers at the University of Sussex and Royal Holloway.

Teaching

Fields of interest

global governance, NGOs, indigenous politics, Latin American politics, politics of knowledge, post-colonial theory, critical methodologies