Kandida Purnell
Dr Kandida Purnell is an international political sociologist with a decade of University teaching experience in the English, Scottish, and US systems. Kandida's research takes an interdisciplinary, de-colonial, and methodologically innovative approach towards investigating the role of bodies in local-global politics through cases including the COVID-19 pandemic, Army/Artist collaborations, performances of war, (un/)commemoration rituals, and sites of the Global War on Terror.
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Bodies and embodiment
Political theory
Social theory
Power
Emotions and affect
Commemoration
Political violence
Books
Articles
Body Politics and Boundary Work: Nobodies on Hunger Strike at Guantánamo (2013–2015)
Published: Feb 04, 2021 by Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
Authors: Kandida Purnell
This article reconsiders power/resistance as it investigates how bodies rendered nobodies might be able to disrupt a particular manifestation of power that is blind to personhood and aims for control over life and death in equal measures with a focus on boundary renegotiation and the dynamics of visibility/invisibility at play around the space of Camp Delta and analysis of the 2013–2015 hunger strike
The Body Politics of COVID-19
Published: Feb 04, 2020 by The Disorder of Things
Authors: Kandida Purnell
Providing a summary of aspects of the body politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, in this piece Kandida reluctantly yet hopefully ‘uses’ the Covid-19 pandemic and responses to it as a way into and forward for the study of body politics within IR and beyond.
Fit for purpose? Boris Johnson's two bodies and the UK "Better Health" strategy
Published: Feb 04, 2020 by Somatosphere
Authors: Kandida Purnell
This piece shows how masculinised, outdated knowledge about bodies has reverberated around the body politic through policy responses to COVID-19 individualising and blaming particular bodies for ‘failing’ to stay strong and protect the NHS to the very detriment of the health of the community of bodies comprising and materialising as the body politic itself.
The museumification of the Scottish soldier and the meaning-making of Britain’s wars
Published: Feb 04, 2020 by Critical Military Studies
Authors: Kandida Purnell and Natasha Danilova
Drawing on interviews with curators of Scotland’s military museums and fieldwork ethnographies, this article explores how the Scottish Soldier is enacted through curation and how, through artefacts and stories, curators (re)produce the Scottish Soldier within and through their museums’ spaces.
Grieving, Valuing, and Viewing Differently: The Global War on Terror's American Toll
Published: Jan 01, 2018 by International Political Sociology
Authors: Kandida Purnell
Investigation into the (in)visibility of suffering and dead American soldiers since 9/11 reveals contest over the knowing, valuing, and counting of American soldiers —in life, injury, and death. Challenging actions discussed in this article demonstrate how Americans were moved to demand and take the right to count and account for soldiers’ suffering and deaths in public and in the very face of dominant bodies that “don't do body counts.”