Dr April Biccum

Ph.D, MA, (Honours) BA
Senior Lecturer
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

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

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Updated:  29 March 2024 / Responsible Officer:  Director (Research Services Division) / Page Contact:  Researchers