FEATURED AUTHOR

Kandida Purnell

Assistant Professor of International Relations
Richmond, The American International University in London

Dr Kandida Purnell is an international political theorist and critical security studies expert with a decade of in-class and online University teaching experience in the English, Scottish, and US systems. Currently working as Assistant Professor of International Relations, Kandida’s monograph Rethinking the Body in Global Politics follows recent publications on the body politics and (in)securities of the COVID-19 pandemic, hunger strike, war commemoration, war performance, and museumifi

Subjects: Art & Visual Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Media and Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Sociology

Biography

Dr Kandida Purnell is an international political theorist with nine years of in-class and online University teaching experience in the English, Scottish, and US systems. Currently working as Assistant Professor of International Relations at Richmond, The American International University in London, Kandida has previously fulfilled the roles of Lecturer in International Relations (Security) at City, University of London and Teaching Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen.

Due for publication in Spring 2021 with Routledge’s Interventions series, Kandida’s mono-graph Rethinking the Body in Global Politics follows recent publications on the body politics and (in)securities of the COVID-19 pandemic, hunger strike, war commemoration, war performance, and museumification. As is a regular commentator at blogs including Duck of Minerva, The Disorder of Things, and Somatosphere, Kandida is also continuing to collaborate with Drs Natasha Danilova and Emma Dolan on the Carnegie-funded ‘War Commemoration, Military Culture, and Identity Politics in Scotland’ project while solo research into ‘Feeling COVID-19’ and ‘Bringing Bodies Back: Repatriation and War Performance within Forever War’ is ongoing.

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Personal Interests

Outside of academia and teaching, Kandida is a reader, cat lover (and owner), walker, swimmer, cyclist, cook, and sun worshipper.

Books

Featured Title

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.”