Investigator
Nisha Shah is an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies. Her research explores how globalization is deployed as a set of discourses that reconstitute political legitimacy beyond principles of sovereignty. This work situates the transformative impact of globalization in not only the movement of goods, services, and information across territorial borders - but, equally important, in the way that globalization's discourses produce and legitimate global governance institutions as sites of political power and authority.
While at the Watson Institute at Brown University, she is considering the degree to which surveillance technologies - conventionally associated with the heightened national security agendas prompted by the war on terror - also embody "global" security discourses. In doing so, she considers the possibility that these technologies disrupt sovereignty's definition of security as the protection of territorial borders and the defense of states and enforce new globalized security directives. She will also offer a senior undergraduate seminar that explores the different ways in which political authority and community have been reformulated in response to contemporary globalization.
She has a PhD in international relations from the University of Toronto. She holds an MSc in international relations from the London School of Economics and a collaborative bachelor's degree in arts and science from McMaster University. She has published in Globalizations and the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and is co-editor of Metaphors of Globalization: Mirrors, Magicians and Mutinies (Palgrave, 2008).
Areas of Interest: critical and normative theories of globalization, global governance, security studies, surveillance technologies, and terrorism/counterterrorism
