Luke Lavender, MRes, Politics and International Relations, QMUL; MA Political Science with a Concentration in CSPT, University of Victoria; BA Politics and International Relations, University of Exeter

Profile

Luke Lavender is a ESRC funded PhD researcher co-supervised by Dr. Lasse Thomassen and Dr. Joe Hoover. His work focuses on how we understand an aporia within democratic accounts of political participation and activism: how do we make sense of actors who engage, participate, or demonstrate politically by performing silence? In engaging with this question, Lukes’ work sits within the research area of ‘Silence Studies’, an area of study which engages with the topic of how silence can be a productive site of political activity or interaction rather that a phenomenon that only indicates the presence of repression, inhibition, or agentic smothering. In this space, Luke engages with two broad concerns. First, how a productive understanding of silence changes our understanding of our own agency in political interaction and, second, how this challenges our understanding of the social context within which political interaction occurs. To point one, Luke engages with how silence relates to our understanding of agency through the use performative speech act theory. To point two, Luke’s research shows how a productive approach to silence as a performative act highlights the dramaturgical character of political interaction, and, more specifically, the way in which actors are choreographed in contexts when silence is enacted or mobilised. These insights are then developed to analyse the concerted efforts of peace activists to integrate silence into their protest repertoire in the first wave of CND activism and thereby show what silence does, has done, or can do for the cause of peace politics.

Luke is also the co-founder of, and acting chair of, Global Theory Forum, a London based ECR research Group focusing on supporting researchers within the discipline of Political Theory whose research engages with clear global dimensions. Luke has also acted as the book reviews editor for Millennium: Journal of International Studies (volume 52)

Teaching

POL 110 Thinking Politically: Introduction to Concepts, Theories and Ideologies

Research

Research Interests:

Linguistic performativity; deconstruction; dramaturgy; post-structuralism; body politics; radical democracy; discourse analysis/theory; aesthetics

Examples of research funding:

PhD: ESRC (1+3) funded from the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership

MA: entrance scholarships from department of Political Science, and from Cultural, Social and Political Thought concentration, University of Victoria, Canada

Publications

MA thesis:

Haptic performativity: exploring the force of bodies and the limits of linguistic action in silent protests, https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13870

Lavender, L., Freeden, M., & Brito Vieira, M. (2025). Embedding Silence into Politics: Book Roundtable Discussion. Theoria, 72(184), 63-87