Aoileann Ni Mhurchu

Biography

I joined the University of Manchester as a lecturer in International Politics in August 2012.  My research and teaching interests lie in the areas of critical citizenship studies, international migration, sovereignty and subjectivity, and theories of time and space. I''m particularly interested in how we can understand ambiguous (hybrid, inbetween) experiences of political identity and belonging rather than only dominant binary experiences (such as citizen/migrant, us/them, included/excluded). Three current key areas I’ve been exploring are 1. theoretical possibilities of conceptualising ambiguous experiences of political identity and belonging; 2. alternative less obvious forms of resistance and participation (political subjectivity) which are enabled from position(s) of ambiguity and 3. the limits of existing frameworks of intelligibility in the symbolic realm for understanding such experiences, and the need therefore to engage with aesthetic forms of meaning and representation in literature and vernacular music and language. This work has been published in journals such as ''Citizenship Studies'', ''Alternatives: Local, Global, Political'', ''International Political Sociology'' and ‘Subjectivity’. My first book, a monograph entitled Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration is published with Edinburgh University Press (see reviews of this in Sociology (2015) and in Political Studies Review (2016)). I also have a co-edited book in Routledge''s Interventions Series entitled_ Critical Imaginations in International Relations._

I am currently a member of the Editorial Board of the Taylor and Francis journal Citizenship Studies and a member of the Critical Global Politics (CGP) cluster at the University of Manchester.