Research
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Making the Eastern West: Perception Politics and Romanian Tourism Branding (paper, with Daniel S. Fleegle; in progress)

Discourses, Legitimacy, and Transnational Politics of LGBTQ+ Violence​​ ​(chapter in edited volume, with Christina DeJong; forthcoming)

​Since the 1989 revolution, the Romanian state has interacted with a wide array of private and supranational actors to influence domestic and foreign knowledge about Romania through tourism strategies that foreground cultural practices and assets. This article examines how heritage tourism promotion in Romania has complemented policy trajectories towards accession into Western geopolitical alliances and economic enmeshment in global neoliberal capitalism. Through a critical discourse analysis of tourism promotional materials and semi-structured interviews with tourist sector actors, it considers efforts by multiple actors (including the Romanian state, influencers, travel agencies, international media organizations, etc.) to define Romania’s heritage and national brand. By leveraging substantial financial and discursive resources, tourism strategies in Romania have sought to produce a coherent and distinct national image while selectively foregrounding Romania’s diversity and historical ties to Europe. It also traces complementarities and divergences among state and non-state actor priorities in the construction of historical and cultural knowledge through Romania’s tourism offerings. We argue a multi-scalar, relational approach exposes the challenges of creating coherent constructions of national identity through heritage tourism that targets various domestic and international audiences.

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)

Prometheus’ Blind Spot: Invoking Rules and Political Histories of Fire  (dissertation)

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.

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.