People

Matthew Kearns

I am an ESRC doctoral candidate within the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, investigating the relationship between military masculinities and contemporary recruitment practices in the British Armed Forces. As such, I am interested in the representations through which the British military seeks to recruit its personnel and how such representations are performative of diverging constructions of gender. I am particularly interested in how ongoing pressures, most notably the persistent difficulty to recruit and retain sufficient personnel, are impacting the relationship between military masculinities and the British military’s recruitment appeals. Through this, I engage with broader feminist debates concerning how gender is performed and negotiated within state militaries and the conditions through which this might shift to disrupt masculine privilege, as well as the conditions through which such privilege is (re)produced.  My research interests are thus situated within the connections between feminist IR, feminist international political economy (IPE) and critical military studies. I also have a wider research interest in the visual and its relationship to security, having previously undertaken research on visual securitization and the war on terror.