Skip to main content
School of Politics and International Relations
  1. School of Politics and International Relations
  2. Study
  3. PhD
  4. Current research students
  5. Student profiles

Luke Lavender

Luke Lavender

Email: l.m.lavender@qmul.ac.uk

Research Topic: How is Silence Political: Understanding Silent Forms of Political Activism and the Limits of Discursive Politics

Supervisor(s): Prof. Lasse Thomassen and Dr. Joe Hoover

Research Interests: Linguistic performativity; deconstruction; post-structuralism statelessness; body politics; radical democracy; critical discourse analysis/theory; aesthetics; kinaesthesia; non-verbal agency.

Education/Professional Qualifications: 

  • BA Politics and International Relations, University of Exeter
  • MA Political Science with a Concentration in Cultural, Social and Political Thought, University of Victoria
  • MRes International Relations, Queen Mary University of London

Work Experience: 

Luke is an ESRC 1+3 funded PhD researcher looking at the tensions the of internal within present approaches to democratic accounts of political activism: how do we make sense of activists who demonstrate via forms of silent protest as a form of political participation? In engaging with the voice-agency paradigm that pervades political thought, Luke is seeking to widen the horizon of how we can imagine that people can and do act politically where voice is not the primary vehicle of agency. Specifically, Luke is critically concerned with the way in which a performative account of silent action may obscure the wider insights that can be gained through thinking about the role silence plays in politics. By interrogating present accounts of what makes silence politically relevant, Luke hopes that looking at silence can broaden our understanding of what it means to act politically, as well as reveal the limits of seeing voice as the only means by which people participate in political life. 

Luke has worked as a teaching associate for during his time as a Masters student at the University of Victoria; during that time he also acted as the Teaching Assistant Consultant for the Department of Political Science, one of two International Teaching Assistant Consultants across the University, and was a writing tutor at the Centre for Academic Communication. 

Since then, Luke has worked as a teaching Associate at Queen Mary, as well as having acted as the Reviews Article Editor the journal of Millennium for volume 52.

Social media: https://twitter.com/MrLukeLavender

Website: https://lavender-labs.com/

 

Back to top