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McManus

Dr Susan McManus

Lecturer in Political Theory
(PhD Nottingham)

Director: MA Politics

Contact Details
Room 024.03.002
tel: ++44 (0) 28 9097 5045
email: s.mcmanus@qub.ac.uk

Teaching Areas

I teach a range of contemporary post-structuralist and critical political theory at all levels, including my own level three module, Contemporary Social and Political Thought that covers important radical thinkers in the modern canon of political theory (Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche) in order to provide a historical and theoretical context for understanding crucial twentieth and twenty-first century critical political theorists (including Adorno, Foucault, Negri, et al). At Master’s level, I teach a range of critical cosmopolitan perspectives in Beyond the Nation, and also contribute to Approaches to Social Science Research.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the fields of poststructuralist, utopian, and radical political theory, both historical and contemporary. I am particularly interested in the ways in which questions of truth and knowledge, critique, political imagination, and hopeful, transformative political agency can be reconceived by contemporary theoretical work within late-modern conditions. I have done research on questions of truth and fiction inpolitical theory and contemporary utopianism, and am currently developing research projects on affective political agency and theorizing global resistance.

Recent/Selected Publications

  • “Cosmopolitan Exception,” in, Journal of International Political Theory 9/2 (forthcoming 2013)
  • “Radical Political Agency: Affective Politics in the Case of the Zapatistas of Chiapas,” in, Contemporary Political Agency: Theory and Practice, Eds., Bice Maiguashca and Raffaele Marchetti (London: Routledge, 2012)
  • “Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective Agency,” in, Theory and Event 14/4 (2011)
  • “Allure and Ambivalence,” in, Review of International Studies 35/4 (2009)
  • “Truth, Temporality, and Theorizing Resistance,” in, Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays in Utopian Thought and Practice, Eds., Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Oxford and Berne: Peter Lang, 2007)
  • “Theorizing Utopian Agency: Two Steps Toward Utopian Techniques of the Self,” Theory and Event, (Vol 10, issue 3, 2007)
  • Fictive Theories: Toward a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination (New York: Palgrave, 2005)
  • “Roland Barthes,” Contemporary Critical Theorists, Ed. Jon Simons (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) (with Andy Stafford)
  • “Fabricating the Future: Becoming Bloch’s Utopians,” in, Utopian Studies 14/2 (2003): 1-22