Dr Ian Shaw

- Postdoctoral Research Associate (School of Geographical and Earth Sciences)
email: Ian.Shaw.2@glasgow.ac.uk
I am a political geographer with a variety of research interests, currently centred on the geopolitics of U.S.-led drone warfare. This research branches into two main areas: (1) Along with Majed Akhter, I have explored the historical geographies of Pakistan; particularly the role secrecy has played in shaping modern Pakistan-U.S. relations. (2) What I call the "Predator Empire"--the increasing use of unmanned technologies to perform targeted killings across the planet, and the slow adoption of drones for law enforcement "everywhere".
I have long-standing engagements in political ontology, particularly through the work of Alain Badiou and his theory of the "event", and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. The latter was part of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary research project on the interactions between humans, institutions, and mosquitoes in Arizona with Paul Robbins and JP Jones.
I have written on the politics of popular culture, including cinema and video games.
More recent work with Katie Meehan and Sallie Marston includes theorizations of the "non-human", particularly the role objects play in (a) configurations and executions of state power; (b) geographic change--what I call the "geo-event".
I started as a research fellow at the University of Glasgow in July 2011, after obtaining an MA and PhD in Geography from the University of Arizona.
