Dr Emma McCluskey

I am a transdisciplinary social scientist whose work focuses on the social and political effects of (in)security practices, grounded in situated contexts and everyday lived experience. My research focuses on two sites: Surveillance and migration.

1) Digital surveillance and democracy

My most recent research, funded by ORA-ESRC (Intelligence and oversight networks: Who guards the guardians?) has examined the evolving landscape of contestation and resistance to state surveillance. Within this project, I also mapped the strategies through which intelligence agencies produced non-accountability and impunity following the Snowden disclosures. Of primary interest to me is the role of surveillance technology in transformations of democratic culture and democratic imagination, particularly within the realm of the ‘everyday’ and spaces traditionally considered unimportant within global politics

2) Migration and politics of diaspora

A second strand of research involves examining the entanglements between (in)security and migration, with a focus on diasporas. My first monograph, 'From Righteousness to Far Right: An Anthropological Rethinking of Critical Security Studies' addressed the mainstreaming of far-right parties in Europe in the wake of the so-called migration 'crisis', based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden with Syrian refugees. The book was awarded the 2020 Best Book Award by the International Political Sociology section of the International Studies Association.

Current research, funded inter alia by the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation examines the way in which politicized identities develop in diaspora and how this influences conflict and peace-building. 

I am co-founding co-editor in chief of the transdisciplinary journal Political Anthropological Approaches to International Social Sciences (PARISS).

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.