Dr April Biccum
Areas of expertise
- Communication Studies 200101
- International And Development Communication 200103
- International Relations 160607
- Specialist Studies In Education 1303
- Other Language, Communication And Culture 2099
- Citizenship 160602
Research interests
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.
Biography
April Biccum, Canadian born, received an MA in Critical theory and Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from Nottingham University.
Researcher's projects
Global Citizenship Education and the global politics of Truth and Knowledge. Includes Global Education Governance, the Knowledge Economy, social capital, state society relations, Global Civil Society and the local politics of inclusion and exclusion.
A conceptual history of the words 'empire' and 'imperialism' and a mapping of approaches to theorising empire in teh social sciences in the context of the American Empire Debate of the early 20th Century.
Current student projects
Heba Al Adawy "Youth Development and Engagement in Pakistani Higher Education"
Past student projects
Erick Viramontes, "Collective aims, otherness and subjectivities in the discourse on national identity in Qatar"
Fiona Allen "United States Containment Doctrine and Sub-Saharan Africa"
Publications
- Biccum, A 2020, 'Global Citizenship', Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, vol. online, pp. 1-23.
- Biccum, A 2020, 'Global Citizenship and neo-republicanism? Problematising the 'neoliberal subjectivities' critique', in Debra D. Chapman, Tania Ruiz-Chapman, Peter Eglin (ed.), The Global Citizenship Nexus: Critical Studies, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 129-152.
- Biccum, A 2018, 'Review: Against international relations norms: postcolonial perspectives', Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 561-567.
- Biccum, A 2018, 'What is an Empire? Assessing the postcolonial contribution to the American Empire Debate', Interventions, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 697-716pp.
- Biccum, A 2018, 'What Can Counterterrorism Learn from Cognitive Justice in Global Citizenship Education?', International Political Sociology, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 382-400.
- Biccum, A 2018, 'Global Citizenship and the Politics of Knowledge: What do you need to know to live in the world?', Scopus conference not found, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 51-68.
- Biccum, A 2018, 'What is at stake in building 'non-Western' international relations theory?', Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 561-567.
- Biccum, A 2016, 'What might celebrity humanitarianism have to do with empire?', Third World Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 998-1015.
- Biccum, A 2016, 'A new development paradigm or business as usual? Exploring the relationship between the political subject and social change', in Amy Skinner, Matt Baillie Smith, Eleanor Brown, Tobias Troll (ed.), Education, Learning and the Transformation of Development, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon and New York, pp. 3-18.
- Biccum, A 2015, 'The politics of education for globalisation: managed activism in a time of crisis', Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 321-338.
- Biccum, A 2013, 'Memorializing Empire, Producing Global Citizens The British Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2007)', Interventions, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 215-232.
- Biccum, A 2013, Review, 'Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: a Critical Introduction', e-International Relations, vol. February 2013.
- Biccum, A 2011, 'Celebrity activists and advocates in development', Global Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 6.
- Biccum, A 2011, 'Marketing Development: celebrity politics and the 'new' development advocacy', Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 7, pp. 1331-1346.
- Biccum, A 2010, Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York.
- Biccum, A 2009, 'Theorising Continuities between Empire & Development; toward a new theory of History', in Mark Duffield and Vernon Hewitt (ed.), Empire, Development & Colonialism; the Past in the Present, James Currey_Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY, USA, pp. 146-160.
