Dr April Biccum

April Biccum, Canadian born, received an MA in Critical theory and Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from Nottingham University.

Ph.D, MA, (Honours) BA

April’s research is framed by the Global Politics of Knowledge and Communication with a combined focus on how the concepts Empire/Imperialism and Global Citizenship are used, theorised and understood in both the public and scholarly domain. Work on Empire/Imperialism combines a conceptual history in the public domain with a theoretical mapping in the social sciences, with a focus on what changes in our epistemology, methodology, disciplinary framing and understanding of the international system if we take Empire/Imperialism as our category of analysis above state, system or capital. Work on Global Citizenship has a combined theoretical and empirical focus examining both how Global Citizenship has been theorised by scholarship in the Social Sciences and how the concept has been operationalised through Global Education Governance and a variety of elite actors in the international domain. Both projects have wider interdisciplinary implications for International Relations, Political Communication, International Political Sociology, studies of Political Mobilisation through Social Movements and Global Civil Society, and critical perspectives on citizenship, development, global governance and the knowledge economy. April explicitly tries to situate her work in an interdisciplinary frame.

April is co-convenor of the Interpretation Method Critique Research Cluster at the Australian National University which has the aim of raising the profile of Interpretivist and Critical methodologies in the social sciences with a specific focus on the politics of knowledge production and undergraduate and graduate student capacity building in this area.

April is currently accepting supervision of HDR or Honours projects in teh areas of political mobilisation, communication, Global Citizenship, Global Education Governance, any aspect of empire or imperialism.