Amanda Conroy

Amanda is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include critical security studies, immigration and migration, borders and bordering, gendered and racialised dimensions of right-wing social movements, (particularly in the US), and the narrative, discourse and change in social movements.

Amanda joined the University of Birmingham in 2016. She recently finished her PhD jointly at the Gender Institute and the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, where she was a Frederick Bonnart-Braunthal Scholar. Her dissertation explored the discursive interpretation of ‘threat’ in a U.S. right-wing movement that organises citizen patrols of the US-Mexican border. Particular focus was on the gendered and racialised dimensions of threat-interpolation, movement participation as identity work, and narrative change in the movement over time.

This work is part of a broader interest in practices and meaning-making in relation to border security regimes. She is currently working on a new project which aims to describe the various praxes by which borders are made by commercial scientists, engineers, innovators and security experts. In doing so, it identifies and interrogates the role of actors and entities outside of a state-border crosser dyad and speaks to practices of policy translation.

Amanda has commented upon US politics in mass media outlets, in particular on the diffusion of ‘fringe’ right-wing discourse into the ‘mainstream’.

She received an MA (with Distinction) in Gender Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (UK) in 2009 and a BA (Honours) in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College (USA) in 2007.