Research and publications

My research is at the intersection of security gender, security studies and queer theory.  Here I include my published journal articles, book chapters, review articles, and additional online publications.  

All publications accessible here or open access. Also see my Queen's University Belfast Pure page.

Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides a foundational guide to queer methodologies in the study of political violence and conflict. Contributors provide illuminating discussions on why queer approaches are important, what they entail and how to utilise a queer approach to political violence and conflict. The chapters explore a variety of methodological approaches, including fieldwork, interviews, cultural analysis and archival research. They also engage with broader academic debates, such as how to work with research partners in an ethical manner. Including valuable case studies from around the world, the book demonstrates how these methods can be used in practice.  Chapters available upon request ahead of publication.

This special issue explores what “queering” means in the context of peacebuilding. The issue addresses an unexamined gap in peacebuilding efforts to achieve gender justice and inclusive security in conflict-affected societies, namely the unique experiences of LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer) individuals and their collective efforts to achieve social justice in contexts of sociopolitical violence. Although there is now over two decades of work to include attention to gender in peacebuilding efforts, little of this work focuses specifically on queer perspectives. Read the introduction here. 

In November 2021 Jamie J. Hagen spoke with trans rights activist Nikita Simonne Dupuis-Vargas Latorre from Bogota, Colombia. Nikita has worked as an activist on issues of transmasculinities and depathologization of identities for 15 years. Nikita is a social communicator and journalist from the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University. He has worked as a public official since 2010 in the District Mayor’s Office of Bogota for the territorialization of LGBT Public Policy.  For this interview Nikita spoke about his work over the past decade
and a half at the intersection of anti-militarization and trans rights. Read here.

The adoption of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda by the UN Security Council constituted a forum-shift by women’s rights advocates away from the human rights system. As queer critique of the WPS agenda gathers pace, this article reflects on the antecedents of the queer exclusions of the WPS agenda in international human rights law. The article thereby reveals the consequences in other international law regimes of human rights law’s queer exclusions. The article concludes with some tentative proposals to utilise the pluralism of international human rights law to expand queer possibilities for both human rights and WPS.  

Research on armed conflict's gender dynamics has expanded significantly in the past decade. However, research in this field pays little attention to sexual orientation and gender identity. Moreover, where scholarship focused on violence against sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals during war exists, it is largely divorced from work on gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict-related environments and from sexuality studies. In this article, we integrate these bodies of work and argue for the theoretical expansion of GBV as a conceptual, empirical, and analytic category to study and explain targeted attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer individuals. Article is available open access. 

Museum workers have taken a massive hit during the pandemic when many museums closed their doors, cut staff hours, instituted layoffs and furloughs, and pushed more into precarity. For many workers, the effect of the pandemic has highlighted long-standing issues of racial, economic, gender and political inequality. This article engages with how workers are responding to this insecurity by highlighting worker-led feminist mobilizations for transformation in museums based in the United States and the United Kingdom. By focusing on efforts for engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement, decolonizing the museum, unionizing workers and providing mutual aid, this article examines worker-led practices of transformation of the museum amid crisis. A special emphasis is put on how workers articulate the importance of feminist solidarity and collective action in envisioning a more just museum of the future. Article is available open access.

This paper considers queer feminist interruptions as a way to halt, reverse and rethink internationalisation in UK higher education (HE). These points of intervention are situated within the queer development studies literature, which provides a framework for understanding internationalisation practices alongside other strategies of Western extraction, critical of claims that internationalisation is important for enhancing diversity. The central questions addressed are: (1) how does queer liberation help academics think differently about promoting, participating in and developing UK HE internationally? (2) What can academics learn from those working to centre queer feminist practices in their transnational research and teaching? .Article is available open access. 

The gendered effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have been documented globally by feminist researchers and activists. However, less explored are the strategies employed by feminist activists to navigate such challenges. Mobilizing feminist scholarship on the politics of crisis and the study of feminist movements, this article presents findings from a collaborative research project that sought to understand how the crisis engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting on feminist activism in Northern Ireland (NI) post-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Drawing on focus groups with local activists, we outline how the effects of the pandemic compound the long history of marginalization and de-prioritization of gender equality and justice seen throughout the peace process and its multiple crises. Open access. 

Key Messages: Gender-neutral policy can depoliticise gender and marginalise trans people. Intersectional and gender-aware politics resists reproducing the gender binary when promoting gender equality Read here. 

In this article, we address hierarchies of knowledge production that have emerged in the two decades of researching the global normative framework, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. We argue that through the constitution of Centres of Excellence (CoE), the well-meaning processes of producing WPS knowledge can reify prevailing global racial hierarchies. We find that these processes rather than achieving emancipatory feminist outcomes can instead serve to narrow the scope of inquiry, pushing marginalised peoples further to the margins. Open access.  Read here. 

The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) hold serious consequences for Latinx queer and trans sex workers, especially those who are undocumented or seeking asylum. These new laws exemplify how racist, sexist, and moralistic legislation uninformed by those most impacted misunderstands both sex work and human trafficking. Mobilizing for change, sex workers of color offer a way to rethink what safety in their communities looks like by centering solutions based on their own experiences.  Read here. 

​This piece considers the importance of the inclusion of LGBT organizations in the Colombia peace accords and what this means for the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in future WPS initiatives. It was published as a part of the Interventions section about queer/ing in/securities. Read here. 

Feminist security studies and emerging queer theory in international relations provide a framework to incorporate a gender perspective in WPS work that moves beyond a narrow, binary understanding of gender to begin to capture violence targeted at the LGBTQ population, particularly in efforts to address SGBV in conflict-related environments. The article explores how a queer security analysis reveals the part heteronormativity and cisprivilege play in sustaining the current gap in analysis of gendered violence. Read here.