Academic staff in SPAIS are particularly interested in supervising in the research areas research listed below:
Analytical political theory; applied ethics; distributive justice; history of political thought.
Marx; Engels; Marxism; philosophy and methodology of the social sciences; Sex, gender, sexuality; masculinities and international politics.
Marriage-related migration; gender and migration (including masculinity); other issues in migration, ethnicity, transnationalism & diaspora; British South Asians (particularly Pakistanis) and other South Asian diasporas; kinship; qualitative methods.
Gender and electoral politics; political representation - descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation; political parties and feminization; gender and the UK parliament.
Critical security studies; conflict and development; peacebuilding; civil society / state interaction in post-conflict states; human security; Southeast Asia, Cambodia Afghanistan and Canada; critical methodologies, including ethnography.
European integration and the politics of the European Union; the European Commission; institutionalist theory, organisational culture and public service ethics; Malta and the EU; European competition policy, including state aid control.
Family (parenting, motherhood and fatherhood, intergenerational relationships); intimacy (personal relationships); work (gender and employment, work-life balance, domestic work, care work); poverty (intra-household, gender, necessities, parenting).
Sociology of scientific knowledge. Finitist epistemology. Technological disasters. Sociology of objectivity. Engineering risk and reliability. Sociology of the environment.
Civil-military relations; security sector reform; British defence policy; military transformation; democratisation; Western Balkans (particularly Serbia).
Political Violence, the Politics of Insecurity, Critical Pedagogy, the Ethics of Difference and the Poetic Subject.
UK political parties, political representation, elections, constitutional reform, gender and politics, feminist activism (UK and US).
Political economy, esp. varieties of capitalism and economic policy-making; states and markets; comparative politics, esp. communist and post-communist politics; political development, institutions and regime change; international relations, esp. international institutions, international political economy and theory.
HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa; EU development policy; EU-ACP relations; regionalism; sustainable development.
Development of small and mid-sized firms in developing countries; relations between China and other developing countries (in particular Latin American); management in developing countries.
Nationalism; ethnicity; migration; everyday nationhood and ethnicity; ethnic return migration; racialisation; East Europe; East European migration.
Development politics; political economy; corruption; the state and state theory; East and South East Asian politics, especially Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma/Myanmar.
Race and racism; popular culture and music; sociology of media; sociological methods; education.
China and its relation to global transformation; theorising emergent transformations in the global order and as part of that, analysing the consequences of China's international trade, the globalisation of its corporate base, the implications of its search for energy security, the impact of its foreign aid programme, its actions within the institutions of global governance, the human rights questions raised by its international expansion, and the geo-political consequences of all of these.
Critical security studies; non-violence; grassroots networks, social movements and the internet; efforts to control and reduce the arms trade; disarmament; US foreign and security policy; the news media and world politics; neoliberalism. I am particularly interested in supervising PhD research across a wide range of themes and cases if the work is motivated by a desire to make a scholarly contribution to assisting progressive, bottom-up social change in world politics.
South Asian Politics; Kashmir and religious nationalism; ethnicity and nationalism in Africa and South Asia; British colonial history and reform 1938-56.
Interdisciplinary or disciplinary (politics/sociology) approaches to the gendered cultures of military and militarised institutions, including the military itself; peacekeeping; private security contracting; veterans.
EU foreign policy; CFSP/CSDP; Europeanisation; EU enlargement; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Western Balkans; institutionalist theories; elite socialisation; crisis management; security sector reform.
East Asian political economy; political development in East Asia; state-business/state-societal relations; Chinese domestic politics and international relations; Taiwanese politics; Sino-EU relations.
Popular culture/media; popular music; stardom; intellectual property.
Marxism and post-marxism; postsecularism and postcolonialism; various topics in the general areas of philosophy of social science, social/sociological theory, politics and ideology, intellectuals, and disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity.
International relations theory; international political and social theory; philosophy of social science; interpretivism and continental philosophy in international relations; trust and fear in world politics; critical security studies; political, legal and ethical dimensions of genocide and political violence.
Theory and politics of multiculturalism and secularism; ethnic identities, national identities and the 'second generation'; ethnic disadvantage and progress in employment and education; comparisons within and between Western Europe and North America; the politics of being Muslim in the West and Islamophobia.
Criminal justice, with a specialist interest in miscarriages of justice; the application of the zemiological perspective; Foucault, Goffman and Bauman.
Social and cultural theory; aesthetics and culture; political sociology; Michel Foucault and political reason.
Participatory and urban governance; social movement activism, political participation and mobilisation among young people and minority ethnic and religious groups; Muslim engagement in governance.
The role of experts, intellectuals, knowledge providers and epistemic communities in international security; international nuclear history and policy; nuclear proliferation, arms races and disarmament; nuclear security; deterrence theory; surprises and unexpected events in international relations; political uses of history and memory; the nexus between popular culture and international security; self-fulfilling and self-denying prophecies in international relations; French nuclear policies.
Critical security studies, critical theory and international relations; technology and security; nuclear security; space security.
European Union politics (including Europeanisation, European Union enlargement, and European Union and civil society participation); democracy, representation and civil society; interest politics and lobbying; lobbying regulation; democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe.
Feminist theory; gender and time; gender and class; family sociology and especially motherhood; postfeminism and popular culture; embodiment; qualitative research.
Social class, cultural and social capital; the sociology of education; social and political attitudes; the use of quantitative methods in these fields as well as qualitative work in these areas.
International relations theory; US foreign policy; 'war on terror'; popular culture and world politics; gender and world politics; transnationalisation of the state; discourse analysis and interpretive methods.
Labour politics; social democracy; political economy; British and comparative politics.
Political parties; party systems; the World Bank; Indian foreign policy; South Asian politics.
Care work and care policy; gender and social policy; non-profit organisations; social inequalities in Japan; comparative policy studies between European and East Asian and among East Asian societies.
International Relations theory; international relations of the Asia-Pacific (particularly security studies and regionalism); Chinese foreign policy and international relations; Chinese politics; political economy of China's transformation.