Research
The Cultural Politics of Democracy
Democracy is often understood as a set of rules, institutions, and procedures. Focusing on struggles over equality and progress, my work explores democracy as a symbolic and ambivalent force. I study how the meanings attached to democracy shape how equality politics and their contestations are seen as possible, permissible, desirable, or undesirable, and how these meanings inform political action. This includes examining how reactionary actors use the language and symbols of democracy to promote anti-feminist, anti-LGBTIQ+, and racist agendas, as well as how progressive movements and civil society harness the language of democracy to advance equity and inclusion.
Feminist and Queer Democratic Practices
From a queer material perspective that centralises lived experiences, my work examines how feminist and queer communities envision social change, build communities and resist oppression, marginalization and normative fictions. Drawing on qualitative and participatory research methods, I have studied a variety of democratic practices, including everyday practices of transformation and collective forms of resistance.
Through an intersectional lens, I am particularly interested in how power relations amongst feminist and queer counterpublics are experienced, negotiated, and contested. I also engage with feminist and queer democratic theory, examining concepts such as political desire and ethics of care as analytical tools for understanding shared political visions and mobilisation.
European Theories of Race and Racism
The basis of my intersectional theorising is a foundational interest in European racial formations. Through the lens of race critical theory, I examine the specific histories and formations of race and racism in Europe. Post-war anti-racialism has led to a refusal to engage with race as an analytical, albeit constructed, category in the social sciences. My work has been part of an interdisciplinary field that addresses these lacunae.
I have worked on contemporary forms of racial denial by theorising post-racialism for the European context in my monograph, Race in Post-racial Europe. More broadly, I have developed the concept of post-imaginaries to capture how post-racialism, post-feminism, and post-homophobia operate as interrelated resistance strategies against transformative social change by mobilising progress and modernity to displace the genealogies of racial, gendered, and sexual inequality.