College: Churchill
Supervisor: Prof. Helen Anne Curry & Prof. Richard Staley
Thesis topic: Knowledge making practices and scientific expertise in militarised rural environments.
Thesis title: Missiles, Modernity, and the Machair: A History of the Scottish Hebrides and its Militarisation (1940-2024)
Research interests: militarisation and militarism, rural ethnography, critical heritage, oral history, postwar & Cold War history, folklore and folk epistemology; modern warfare; surveillance; militarised visual culture; histories of conservation and environmentalism; agricultural & crofting history; archival genres; declassified documents; Gaelic poetry; nonsecular Anthropocene; imperial histories; archipelagic thinking; the edges of the Atlantic Ocean; Scottish MIC; militant poetics.
Funding: Gates Scholar & part of Wellcome Trust funded research project 'From Collection to Cultivation'.
Teaching
I have offered undergraduate supervisions for the following papers:
- HPS Part II Paper 3: Modern Medicine and Life Sciences
- HPS Part II Paper 2: Sciences and Empires – Sciences of Territory and Population / Anthropologies
- HPS Part II Paper 2: Sciences and Empires – Science, State and Society in South Asia
- HPS Part II Paper 6: Ethics and Politics of Science, Technology and Medicine (Science and Activism)
- HPS Part II Paper 6: Ethics and Politics of Science, Technology and Medicine (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge)
- HSPS Tripos Part 1: Introduction to Sociology - Modern Societies I (SOC1)
Roles
- CRASSH Research Network Military Surplus convenor
- Decolonise HPS Working Group member
- Feminist HPS Reading Group (2021-) founder and convenor
- Learning for Purpose co-director, Gates Cambridge
- HPS workshop co-organiser, HPS Cambridge
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Key publications
In progress
“Dirty Earth, Dark Harvest — The Militarisation of Hebridean Soil” in Breithoff, Esther, Layla Renshaw, and Matthew Leonard (eds.), (Post)conflict ecologies: rethinking the afterlives of conflict and violence in more-than-human worlds, London, UK: UCL Press.
"It Takes a Village: The Military Base as Relational Infrastructure." Critical Military Studies, Special Issue: Base Women and Beyond: Critical Feminist Analyses of Military/Nuclear Installations and their Discontents.
"Warships, Bylaws, Torpedoes: Militarising Britain’s Atlantic Fringe." Critical Military Studies, Special Issue: Military Flows: The Liquid Politics of Military-Industrial Complex.
"Sentinel species, Military Build-Up and the War the Come", Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review.
Published/forthcoming
“Omenic missiles, Cold War specters” in Chao, Sophie, Christine Winters, and David Schlosberg (eds.), Beyond Bios, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Forthcoming]
"Spectral Sonics: Field Recordings from an Extractive Zone." American Anthropologist, Special Section/Multimodal Anthropologies Section. [Forthcoming]
"Properties of War: The Militarisation of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan" in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, 2023, Vol 9, Issue 1, pp. 1-24.
“Multispecies Mediations: Boundaries of Life in the Extractive Zone", in Kirksey, Eben, Karin Bolender, and Sophie Chao (eds.), The Promise of Multispecies Justice, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2022).
"Natural Nation: Cultivating a Post-Extractive Azerbaijan", MRes thesis, University of Sydney. 2020.
"Phenotypic Personhood: Epigenetics and the Biolegality of Processing Asylum" in Biolegalities: Brave New Law (2020).
"Roundtable Review: Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability" in Somatechnics, 2019, Vol 9, Issue 2-3, pp. 376-500.
Other publications
2023. “The Militarization of Housing Policy in Contemporary Azerbaijan.” Progressive International: The Internationalist Newsletter, Issue 37.
2022. "Heaven on Another Scale." Responses to Pale Blue Dot (1990) by Voyager 1, Pilot Press.
2021. “Book Review: What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2022, Vol. 8 No. 1. Special Section: Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies
2021. "Comrades & Companions." Interactive e-book (self-published). 25 May.
2020. “Emergent Practice for Urgent times.” Reflection. Sydney Environment Institute. 24 August.
2020. "Trickster’s Plant." Blog Post. Urban Field Naturalist. 20 August. Available online.
2020. "A Breath, Shared Between Two." Blog Post. Urban Field Naturalist. 22 August. Available online.
Selected Conference/Invited Presentations
2023. “Militarised Pastoral.” Military Surplus Seminar Series. CRASSH, University of Cambridge.
2023. “Hum of a Warring Sea — Sonic (De)militarisation in the Scottish North.” Big Data Lives Symposium: Sensing Technologies — Imaginaries, Futurities, Practices of Control and Care, Universität Bern. Bern, Switzerland
2023. "Warring Waves: on the sonic (de)militarisation of the Hebrides." Beyond Bios Symposium, University of Sydney/Sydney Environmental Institute. Sydney, Australia
2023. "Missile Harvest: From Machair to Military Proving Ground." (Post)conflict ecologies: rethinking the afterlives of conflict and violence in more-than-human worlds workshop. Birkbeck University. London, United Kingdom.
2023. "Crude sonics: field recordings from an extractive zone". Departmental Seminar. School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. University of Oxford.
2023. "Dietary Decline: Key Ingredients in the Depopulation of St. Kilda." Cambridge Global Food Security seminar. University of Cambridge.
2022. " The Virile Crescent: Pure Seeds, Demonstration Farms, and the British Mandate's Vision to Re-Engineer Iraq." The British Society for the History of Science Annual Conference. Queen's University of Belfast.
2022. "Turning Soldiers into Farmers: The Curative Promise of Agriculture." Part of Executive Session 'The political and ecological (dis)orders of war'. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. Seattle.
2022. “The Map, The Story, and the Photograph,” The Virtual Otherwise, Society for Cultural Anthropology – Society for Visual Anthropology Biennial Conference, University of Pennsylvania, Virtual.
2022. "Seeds of War? Agricultural Expertise and the Governance of Militarised Landscapes." Gates Day of Research. University of Cambridge.
2022. "Ghostly Oil: Spectral Storytelling within the Industrial Zone." Graduate Workshop on Environmental Multimodal Methods. UPenn/Harvard. Online.
2021. “An Extractive Science? Complicated Industries and Crude Natures.” 4S Annual Conference. Panel: Toxic Goodness - Harmful Legacies, Hopeful Futures. Online.
2021. “Wet Air: Living within an Atmosphere of Extraction.” 4S Annual Conference. Panel: Diseased Landscapes - Health and Illness in Territories of Extraction. Online.
2021. “Multispecies Mediations in a Post-Extractive Zone (ft. discussion with Carla Freccero).” Multispecies Justice Events. Online. https://youtu.be/WoObPqtXDp0?feature=shared
2021. “Drilling for a Theory: Epistemic Extraction in the Oilfields of Baku.” EnviroLab Graduate Conference (Conference Panel: ‘Patchy’ Places and Ecologies of Capitalism). University of Pennsylvania. Online.
2020. “Boundary Lines in Entangled Worlds: Fieldwork Reflections.” Gender and Cultural Studies Work-in-Progress Presentation. Online.
2020. “Post-Extractive Dreams: Reimagining Nature in the Industrial Zones of Baku.” University of Sydney SSPS HDR Event. Online.
2020. “Multispecies Mediations: Boundaries of Life in the Post-Extractive Zone.” Multispecies Justice Collective. Online.
2020. “Pipeline Watermelons: The Convergence of Petrochemical and Agricultural Technologies in Azerbaijan.” Imperial Terroir Conference/Workshop. Melbourne.
2019. “De(naturalising) the Sovereign: The Multispecies Allies and Enemies of the Azerbaijani Nation-State.” Everyday Militarism Symposium. Sydney.
2018. “Apocalyptic Ableism: Troubling the Discourse of Preparedness and Proactivity within Disability-Inclusive Emergency Responses.” The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Conference. Melbourne.
2018. “Bio-Polygraphs, Nonconsensual Data, and the Suspicious Body of the Unaccompanied Minor.” 4S Sydney TRANSnational STS Conference. Sydney.
2018. “Inside the Storm, Outside the Law: Extrajudicial Emergency Responses and the Withdrawal of Disabled Rights in the Era of Climate Change.” Narratives of Climate Change Symposium. Newcastle, Australia
2018. “Viral Posts, Viral Fears: A Biopolitical Analysis of the 'European Migrant Crisis' through Hungarian Social Media Content.” Nations in Cyberspace Conference. Budapest, Hungary.
2018. “Weathering powers, weathered bodies: an examination of disability and ecological ableism in the era of climate change.” Australian Anthropological Society Conference. Adelaide, Australia.
2017. “Like That Neoprene, Thick and Pliable: Rewriting Neuropathic Pain Scales and Verbal Descriptors through the Genre of Pain Memoirs.” Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science Conference. Sydney.
2017. “Off-Tempo, On Duty: Crip Work, Non-Compliant Temporalities, and the Challenge of a Chrononormative NDIS.” Law, Literature & the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference. Melbourne.
2017. “Safety in Numbers? Algorithmic Feminism and the Use of Gender (Big) Data for Women's Health and Wellbeing.” UTS Feminists at Law - Revisiting Identity Symposium. Sydney.
Awards/Fellowships
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Landhaus Fellowship, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
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Research Fellow, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
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Knowledge Management Fellow, The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)
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Academic Merit Prize, University of Sydney (2018)
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Raewyn Connell Prize in Sociology Theory, University of Sydney (2018)
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University of Sydney Qualitative Methods Prize, University of Sydney (2017)
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Award for Academic Excellence, University of Sydney (2013)
Fieldwork Experience
- Outer Hebrides, Scotland
- Baku, Azerbaijan
- Žitný ostrov/Csallóköz, Slovakia
- Regional New South Wales, Australia
Currently working on (2024-):
Essays
-Scottish Gaelic poetry and the Cold War / Gaelic Realism
-The archives and activism of Keep Nato Out (KNO)
-Small Oat (Coirce Beag) & cultural revitalisation in Uist
-State paternalism, extinction myths, and the island of St Kilda (Title: The Uninhabitable - Multispecies Loss and Exile in St Kilda )
-Postwar (rural) protest culture in the Scottish Hebrides
-From Croft to Garrison: Militarised Livelihoods in the Outer Hebrides
-A socio-cultural history of the UK’s private defence industry
-The spectral question in contemporary Scottish filmmaking
-Peter Watkin’s Journey (1987) and the nuclear hyper-narrative
-The River Clyde’s ‘Mired’ History: From Brigantines to Frigates, Colonies to Conflicts
-Feminist reterritorialisation at Peaton Wood Peace Camp
-'Women Say No to Nato' & Cynthia Cockburn’s legacy
-Subimperial Empire(s) - AUKUS & the Scottish-Australian Connection
-An elemental history of TRIDENT
-Histories of environmental activism in Nairn
-Warring Waves: Sounds and Silences of a Militarised Archipelago (based on work with HWDT re: the sonic effects of military war games in the Sea of Hebrides)
-Nuclear subs, war pods, and counter-surveys (an environmental history of BUTEC)
-The political economy of astro-militarisation in the Scottish Hebrides (Title: The Folly and the Spaceport)
-Incomers vs Mainlanders: the politics of Indigeneity in the Scottish Hebrides
-Leverburgh & Leverhulme
-Maurice Wilkins and the demilitarisation of the sciences (part of more extensive work on the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group)
-György Kepes and the War Vision
-The notebooks of Alasdair Gray / a literary psychogeography of Lanark
-Epistemic militarisation
-Dream ethnographies / an ethnography of dreams
Special Issues
-Demilitarisation as Environmental Care
-Military Surplus: The Hidden Life of the Military-Industrial Complex
-The Military-Industrial-University Complex
Monograph
Missiles over the Machair: the Militarisation of the Scottish Hebrides
Poetry collection
Pastoral, Imperfect: Poems from a Rural Garrison
Workshops
-The Communal Eye: Learning to Read Declassified Military Documents Together
-From Uist to Gaza: Lines of Complicity and Connection
