Luke Lavender, MA Political Science with a Concentration in Cultural, Social and Political Thought, UVic; BA Politics and International Relations, University of Exeter

Profile

Luke Lavender is an ESRC funded 1+3 PhD student at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. Luke is working on a project is co-supervised by Dr. Lasse Thomassen and Dr. Joe Hoover that seeks to understand an aporia within present approaches to democratic accounts of political activism: how do we make sense of activists who demonstrate via forms of silent protest as a form of political participation? In engaging with the voice-agency paradigm that pervades political thought, Luke is seeking to widen the horizon of how we can imagine that people can and do act politically where voice is not the primary vehicle of agency. Specifically, Luke is looking to the silent protests of ‘illegal’ stateless populations to see how people challenge given categories of what it means to be political and act politically via unconventional practices of dissent.

Luke is also acting as the book reviews editor for Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Teaching

POL 263 Modern Political Thought

POL 106 Introduction to International Relations

Research

Research Interests:

Linguistic performativity; deconstruction; statelessness; body politics; radical democracy; discourse analysis/theory; aesthetics

Examples of research funding:

PhD: ESRC (1+3) funded from the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership

MA: entrance scholarships from department of Political Science, and from Cultural, Social and Political Thought concentration, University of Victoria, Canada

Publications

MA thesis:

Haptic performativity: exploring the force of bodies and the limits of linguistic action in silent protests, https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13870