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Rhiannon  Emm

Ms Rhiannon Emm

Biography

Rhiannon is a LISS-DTP 1+3 funded PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies, researching the international politics of ‘home’. Her research uses poststructural methods and theory to investigate the political content in discourses of ‘home’, with a specific focus on islands (Tuvalu, the Chagos Archipelago, and Hawai’i). She has further interests in international relations theory and philosophy of the social sciences more generally. She holds a BA in International Relations and an MA in International Conflict Studies, both also from the Department of War Studies.

Rhiannon is also deputy editor for Millennium: Journal of International Studies, co-ordinator for the PGR Peer Support Network, and co-organiser of the Global Theory Forum working group (launching Sept 2024, LISS-DTP funded). She is a member of BISA, EISA, CEEISA and ISA.  

Research Interests

  • Home in international perspective
  • Politics of emplacement, identity, and indigeneity
  • Post-structural international relations theory

Thesis title 

Theorising Home in International Relations

Abstract

The politics and rhetoric of home have implicitly undergirded international relations – both actual and theoretical – in the modern era of the nation/state. Analyses of international relations often deploy ‘home’ in both description and analysis but rarely interrogate what home means or does within these contexts. This thesis aims to explicate the political/rhetorical power of ideas of home in a way that IR theory has failed to do thus far. In tracing the taken-for-granted concept of home it will show the political work done by the concept (and its concealment).

It does this through a discourse analysis of: the Chagossian ‘right to go home’ following the forcible exile from their archipelago and their lack of sovereign claim to the land; the Tuvaluan ‘First Digital Nation’ strategy for digitising the islands in the face of rising sea levels; and the Hawaiian discourse concerning who is Hawaiian and the role this plays in imagining a future (restored) sovereign state of Hawai’i.

Supervisors 

Research

DYLDnpuXcAYRMDU
Research Centre in International Relations (RCIR)

The Research Centre in International Relations conducts research on practices of security and conflict, their transformation, and their social and political implications.

Research

DYLDnpuXcAYRMDU
Research Centre in International Relations (RCIR)

The Research Centre in International Relations conducts research on practices of security and conflict, their transformation, and their social and political implications.