Research Areas
My research is broadly aimed at reducing war; it bridges feminist theory, critical security studies, and critical/post development studies. I have contributed research on topics including sexual violence in war, truth and reconciliation commissions, military culture, images and international relations, and women in combat.
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Military sexual violence (MSV) is an international problem. Even as MSV is a regular and predictable problem across national militaries, the institutions remain associated with discipline, order, codes of honour, and security.
Indeed, across most Western states, the military remains one of the most trusted national institutions (Johnson 2018; ABC News 2018). How it is possible that national militaries maintain public legitimacy and confidence despite publicization of a consistent sexual violence epidemic?
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This project is a comparative analysis of four countries that have removed the exclusion for women: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. It is currently funded by the Australian Research Council.
The project examines the politics behind the decision to remove the combat ban, assesses what each country was hoping to achieve with the policy change, and evaluates the impacts of the policy change in terms of gender integration. This project is being extended to include an analysis of the politics of military sexual violence in these case countries.
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Despite increased attention to military suicide rates from policy makers and the media, there seems to be a disconnect between available medical research on military suicide, and media and policy framing of military suicide. Put simply, there is a persistent myth that soldiers become vulnerable to suicide primarily when they are exposed to combat and military operations.
This project is a comparative analysis that focuses on military suicide in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. This project will be the first comparative analysis of military suicide rates that focuses on media representations, policy responses, and medical data.
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The study of women, gender and security in post-conflict environments has been a long-term and ongoing focus. Research in this area began with a project examining the experiences of female combatants in Sierra Leone’s civil war, and the challenges they face reintegrating into society post-conflict.
Subsequent sub-projects have included attention to the gendered nature of peace-keeping and police-keeping in Timor Leste, peace-keeper masculinities in Palestine, the role of amnesty in peace agreements, the types of methods used to measure truth and reconciliation, and the ties between colonial logic and post-conflict reintegration rhetoric.
There are several future projects planned within this theme, including follow-up research with female combatants in Sierra Leone, which will interrogate the concept of ‘reintegration’ and consider the long-term ‘impacts’ of war for women.
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This is a 4.5-year research project, led by Professor Lene Hansen at the University of Copenhagen, examining the role images play in world politics.
My specific role is to consider how the gendered aspects of security images (for example, the Abu Ghraib images) in world politics and how this may impact our understanding of world events. I am currently working on a paper examining how male soldiers were represented in images over the course of the Iraq war.
“This feminist storytelling about war itself is the most radical act of dissent. Remember when they did not want us to study or research war, and write about it? We could mourn its victims, but could we have a politics highlighting its violence and failures, and demanding its end?”