Dr Louise Pears

Profile

I am Associate Professor in Global Security and Gender. I am currently the Director of Student Education. Core areas of research expertise are international security, gender, and militarisation. Teaching is at the heart of what I do, and I try to take a feminist approach in my work centring care, joy and community. 

I am active in the growing community of teaching track scholars in Politics and International Studies. As co-Director of the Centre for Teaching Innovation and Scholarship I was awarded the Political Studies Association Jacqui Brigs Prize for the team advancing teaching and learning in politics studies. I was awarded a University of Leeds Early Stage Collaborative Excellence Award in recognition of excellent practice in student education. I am a founding member of Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education network. I also host the podcast Politics and Pedagogy with Madeleine Le Bourdon. 

I was awarded my PhD through the Centre in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Leeds in 2016. Prior to this I studied at University of Bristol and University of Cambridge. I have worked on a range of research projects including a British Studies Association funded project #GlobalChallenges: Social media, pedagogy and International Studies investigating how social media can be brought into the International Studies classroom to improve teaching on the politics of global challenges, Secrecy Privacy and Intelligence Network fellowship project on the CIA’s use of social media, Democratic Reflections project, an extension of a three-year project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, exploring how citizens responded to and evaluated televised election debates; Militarization 2.0, alongside Nick Robinson here in POLIS, a Swedish Research Council funded project exploring militarisation on social media. Outside of academia, I have worked at Google, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth.
 

Research interests

My research interests are in Feminist Security Studies, Popular Culture and World Politics, Race and Postcolonial International Relations, Critical Terrorism Studies and Research Methods. What underlies all these areas is an interest in ‘the margins, silences and bottom rungs’ (Enloe, 1996) of International Relations. I am interested in how security operates at the level of the everyday and the research methods that we can use to better understand this. In particular, I have experience working with focus groups as a tool to study the vernacular of security

Qualifications

• 2015: PhD, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds
• 2012: MA Gender Research, University of Leeds, distinction, excellence prize
• 2010: MSc Gender and International Relations, University of Bristol, distinction
• 2007: BA Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge
• University of Leeds Teaching Award

Professional memberships

• British International Studies Association
• Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education (ASPIRE)
• Secrecy Privacy and Intelligence Network

Student education

I am on a Teaching and Scholarship contract and I love being part of a teaching and scholarship focused community here at Leeds and across the discipline. I am interested in digital teaching, open education methods and critical pedagogies. It is important to me as a feminist researcher that my teaching practice is inclusive, potentially emancipatory, and student-centred.

I teach on modules relating to International Security, Gender, Politics of Global Challenges, and Research Methods. I enjoy supervising dissertation projects at undergraduate and postgraduate level and I will always make time to talk to students who have a shared interest in any of the areas I research and work in.