Research & Curriculum Vitae
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Discourses, Legitimacy, and Transnational Politics of LGBTQ+ Violence (chapter in edited volume, with Christina DeJong; forthcoming)
Around the world, members of LGBTQ+ communities experience a variety of forms of institutionalized violence embodied in codified laws (i.e., criminalization of gender-affirming bathroom use by trans individuals, morality and decent laws weaponized sexual orientation and gender identity minorities, and "anti-homosexuality" laws that punish same-sex sexual behaviors) as well as social practices (i.e., strict gender roles, scapegoating, and police brutality). Penalties for transgression range in severity from physical assault and fines to incarceration and death. In this chapter, we investigate how actors justify and contest the legitimacy of institutionalized violence against members of LGBTQ+ communities. While describing how various actors frame LGBTQ+ politics in Poland and Uganda, we situate national-level political debates about LGBTQ+ violence within broader transnational discourses. We argue transnational LGBTQ+ discourses shape global and local norms related to governance, law enforcement, and state authority.
Rhetoric and International Rules (paper; in progress)
This paper responds to the fact that actors articulate meanings of rules in flexible and context-specific ways, but the literature on international legal, norm-based, strategic-logical, and ethical/moral rules typically treats them as pre-given, relatively stable objects. This study examines how actors invoke rules to leverage the authority and claimed universality of rules concepts to elicit specific actions and legitimize behavioral prescriptions. Such invocations contest presumed-to-be-stable international norms and laws and enable the formation of innovative configurations of governance, institutions, and conceptions of appropriate conduct. Starting from Wittgenstein’s observation that rules cannot directly govern action and drawing on recent scholarship on rhetorical adaptations of international norms, I argue rules invocations constitute a resource through which meanings of rules are produced and negotiated. Rather than merely delimiting what is allowed or prohibited, rhetorical invocations of rules change the meaning of the rules they purport to reference. A rhetorical approach to international politics that rethinks assumptions about the internal coherence of rules and global processes of normative change uncovers social processes that are under-explored by dominant scholarship on international norms and law.
Global Studies Approaches to International Norms: The Rhetorical Politics of Legalization (paper; in progress)
The discipline of Global Studies offers a holistic, transdisciplinary, and Eurocentrism-eschewing lens through which to examine the local-global interactions that constitute socio-political and economic phenomena. This paper advances Global Studies approaches to studying international norms, with particular attention to the construction, reproduction, and contestation of standards of appropriate wartime use of incendiary munitions and anti-personnel mines. By tracing the rhetorical mutual construction of standards of appropriate incendiary bombardment and national identity, I examine the shift from precision bombing to obliteration bombing during WWII, the widespread use of incendiaries during the Korean war, and the growing backlash against American deployment of napalm during the Vietnam war. As actors invoked various international legal and norm-based rules, notions of military reciprocity and necessity, strategic reasoning and deterrence theories, and ethics to debate appropriate wartime conduct, they co-produced and revised specific friend-enemy distinctions. These rhetorical invocations are flexible discursive tools for legitimating action that (re)define the scope of the subjects they purport to govern, including what constitutes an incendiary weapon, membership to protected groups such as “civilians,” and what groups fall within the protective umbrella of the state.
De-Centering Employability: Reimagining Student Achievement in Political Education (paper; in progress)
The high cost of studying at American universities simultaneously limits their ability to promote socio-economic mobility and creates institutional incentives to foreground employability skills (i.e., data analysis, inter-personal communication, critical thinking, etc.) as a primary marker of degree utility. The centrality of employability skills to how political science departments market their course offerings constitutes an attempt to retain students legitimately concerned about post- college financial stability. This paper examines the relationship between neoliberal discourses and collective understandings of the purpose of political education. It argues that overwhelming attention given to employability skills inhibits students from reimagining global futures in which other kinds of skills might ascend in importance or in which they might put their education towards different ends. Moreover, it is particularly integral to the study of political science to include within its purview analyses of the socio-political factors that animate its own pedagogy.
Prometheus’ Blind Spot: Invoking Rules and Political Histories of Fire (dissertation)
By examining people’s evolving justifications of practices related to firefighting (protecting against and rebuilding after conflagration) and fire setting (debating the appropriate use of incendiary munitions during armed conflict), the project demonstrates that the meaning of rules is flexibly constructed as they are applied in action. I explore rhetorical rule-meaning-making through the empirical lens of responses to fire events partly because human affairs have taken countless unexpected turns on account of people succeeded in harnessing, responding to, and making sense of fire in pioneering ways and partly because fire events touch human life beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries and levels of analysis. These political histories of fire demonstrate that shifts in dominant notions of appropriate conduct in urban design and planning, public service provision, organization of state bureaucracies, state culpability, and international law draw on and tap into rules concepts from a diverse array of areas of life. Through invocations of rules, related to specific fire events, actors give context-specific meaning to general criteria for judging appropriate action. By invoking rules to justify actions, people leverage the authority and claimed universality of rules concepts to elicit specific actions and to legitimize behavioral prescriptions. Historically, doing so has also contested presumed-to-be-stable existing rules (including international norms and law) and enabled the formation of innovative configurations of domestic governance, international institutions, and new constellations of conceptions of appropriate conduct.
Conferences
2023 APSA Teaching & Learning Conference, Baltimore, MD, USA
De-Centering Employability: Reimagining Student Success in Political Education (paper)
2022 American Political Science Association Annual Conference, Montreal, QC, Canada
Discussant, Human Rights and Refugee Crises During Civil Wars (panel)
2021 International Studies Association Annual Conference, virtual due to COVID-19 pandemic
“Legal, Moral, and Identity Rhetorics and the Politics of Incendiary Munitions Use” (paper)
“From Rules-as-Entities to Rules-in-Action: Rescuing Rhetoric in International Politics” (paper)
Chair, New Approaches to International Norms, Rules, and Stigma Studies (panel)
2020 International Studies Association Annual Conference, cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic
“This is How It’s Done’: Rules as Rhetoric and Meaning-Making in International Politics” (paper)
2019 British International Studies Association Annual Conference, London, United Kingdom
“Institutions Beyond Rules” (paper)
International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, United States
“Incendiary Warfare and International Rules” (paper)
2017 International Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States
“Grounding Social Processes: Rules, Norms, and Decisions” (paper)
2016 International Studies Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA, United States
“International Normative Regimes and Local Alternatives” (paper)
“Transcending Assigned Identities: Queering Statehood” (paper)
2015 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, United States
“Evolving Humanitarian Practices: Rethinking the Norm Life Cycle Model” (paper)
“Excessive Cruelty during Armed Conflict” (paper, co-authored with C. DeJong)
International Studies Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, United States
“Whose Norm is it Anyway? Non-Western Norm Contestation” (paper)
“Mothers of Dragons, Kings, & Nations: Gender Norms & War in Game of Thrones” (Paper)
2014 International Studies Association Northeast Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States
“Goal Contestation, Marginalization, Intersectionality, and Patterns of Social Movements' Pursuit of Justice” (paper)
International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada
“Discourse and Policy Permanence: US Non-Intervention in Rwanda” (paper)
2013 International Studies Association Northeast Annual Conference, Providence, RI, United States
“(Re)Conceptualizations of “Power” & “Security” Based on the Experiences of Gay Men” (paper)
Undergraduate International Affairs Research Conference, Washington, DC, United States
Discussant and Moderator, Civil Conflict and its Aftermath (panel)
2012 International Studies Association Northeast Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States
“Dynamic Norms and the Status Quo: The UN, Sovereignty & R2P” (paper)
2011 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada
“Mass Murder & Mens Rea: The Intent Requirement in International Criminal Law” (paper)
De-Centering Employability: Reimagining Student Success in Political Education (paper)
2022 American Political Science Association Annual Conference, Montreal, QC, Canada
Discussant, Human Rights and Refugee Crises During Civil Wars (panel)
2021 International Studies Association Annual Conference, virtual due to COVID-19 pandemic
“Legal, Moral, and Identity Rhetorics and the Politics of Incendiary Munitions Use” (paper)
“From Rules-as-Entities to Rules-in-Action: Rescuing Rhetoric in International Politics” (paper)
Chair, New Approaches to International Norms, Rules, and Stigma Studies (panel)
2020 International Studies Association Annual Conference, cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic
“This is How It’s Done’: Rules as Rhetoric and Meaning-Making in International Politics” (paper)
2019 British International Studies Association Annual Conference, London, United Kingdom
“Institutions Beyond Rules” (paper)
International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, United States
“Incendiary Warfare and International Rules” (paper)
2017 International Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States
“Grounding Social Processes: Rules, Norms, and Decisions” (paper)
2016 International Studies Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA, United States
“International Normative Regimes and Local Alternatives” (paper)
“Transcending Assigned Identities: Queering Statehood” (paper)
2015 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, United States
“Evolving Humanitarian Practices: Rethinking the Norm Life Cycle Model” (paper)
“Excessive Cruelty during Armed Conflict” (paper, co-authored with C. DeJong)
International Studies Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, United States
“Whose Norm is it Anyway? Non-Western Norm Contestation” (paper)
“Mothers of Dragons, Kings, & Nations: Gender Norms & War in Game of Thrones” (Paper)
2014 International Studies Association Northeast Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States
“Goal Contestation, Marginalization, Intersectionality, and Patterns of Social Movements' Pursuit of Justice” (paper)
International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada
“Discourse and Policy Permanence: US Non-Intervention in Rwanda” (paper)
2013 International Studies Association Northeast Annual Conference, Providence, RI, United States
“(Re)Conceptualizations of “Power” & “Security” Based on the Experiences of Gay Men” (paper)
Undergraduate International Affairs Research Conference, Washington, DC, United States
Discussant and Moderator, Civil Conflict and its Aftermath (panel)
2012 International Studies Association Northeast Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States
“Dynamic Norms and the Status Quo: The UN, Sovereignty & R2P” (paper)
2011 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada
“Mass Murder & Mens Rea: The Intent Requirement in International Criminal Law” (paper)