Aoileann Ní Mhurchú

I joined the University of Manchester in August 2012.  My research and teaching interests lie in the areas of critical citizenship studies, international migration, sovereignty and subjectivity. My work has been published in journals such as Alternatives: Local, Global, Political; Citizenship Studies; Geopolitics; International Political Sociology; Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 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 (see here for a review in International Studies Review)

I am currently an Assistant Editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Citizenship Studies and Cluster Lead for the Critical Global Politics (CGP) cluster at the University of Manchester.

International Migration; Identity and Belonging; Bordering Practices; Critical Citizenship Studies; Postcolonialism/Decolonialism; Poststructuralism; sovereignty; Aesthetics

My research is located at the intersection of international migration, contemporary political and philosophical thought, and critical citizenship studies. It explores the changing nature of identity and belonging in the context of increasing global migration. In particular i have explored how modern binary spatio-temporal experiences (namely, us/them, included/excluded, citizen/migrant) are breaking down (in whatever fragile form they ever existed in) in favour of more fluid and overlapping 'ambiguous' experiences of political identity and belonging. I am interested in how contemporary political and philosophical thought helps us to engage with these alternative experiences and the questions of (alternative) voice which they raise in the context of political agency. My work draws on poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and postcolonial/decolonial studies.

I am currently working on a project which considers different experiences of in-between-ness/hybridity in the context of migration in Europe and North America across generations. It explores three main areas 1. theoretical possibilities of conceptualising inbetweeness; 2. alternative less obvious forms of resistance and participation which are enabled from such positions; 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, music and poetry.