*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Laura J. Shepherd is a Professor of International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Laura is the current President of the International Studies Association (2023–2024), a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018–2020), and has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London, UK, since 2016. Laura’s primary research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda and its attendant dynamics of security, gender, and violence. Laura has undertaken research investigating logics of gender and space in UN peacebuilding discourse and examining advocacy around, and implementation of, the Women, Peace and Security agenda at global, national, and local levels. Laura's Australian Research Council Future Fellowship research investigated the relationship between the Women, Peace and Security agenda and efforts to prevent and counter terrorism and violent extremism, with a specific focus on Australia, Sweden, and the UK. Laura is particularly interested in feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial approaches to world politics and she has strong interests in pedagogy and popular culture. Laura is author/editor of several books, including, most recently The Self and Other Stories: Being, Knowing, Writing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) and Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Logics of Global Governance (Oxford University Press, 2021). She spends too much time on Twitter, where she tweets from @drljshepherd.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

This is such an interesting question! First of all, it presumes that I have a “field”, and I’m never sure exactly what that means, or rather how I would identify myself or my field. I often refer to myself as “ill-disciplined” in many ways, and this makes it hard for me to tell a straightforward story about who I am as a scholar and where I call “home”. My undergraduate degree was in social anthropology and I completed double Honours in feminist anthropology and cultural studies (this sounds much more impressive than it actually is – in reality I barely scraped an Upper Second class degree so perhaps I should have put more energy into a single project rather than dividing my efforts in this way!). It wasn’t until I went back to postgraduate education some years later that I learned it was possible to specialise in the study of international relations, which I did, in my Master’s program. It was actually a combined program with a fifty per cent gender studies component, which was perfect for me because it allowed me to continue to explore debates in feminist theory and gender studies and to engage with global politics from that perspective. Since then, I completed a PhD in international relations, and all my academic appointments have been in international relations, so I guess international relations (IR) is my field, but I very much feel like an outsider a lot of the time, because I bring both a feminist and an anthropological sensibility to my IR work. 

This history definitely informs my views on the most exciting research happening in IR at the moment. I have been delighted to engage with some of the recent feminist work on care and kinship: I am thinking particularly here of contributions by Sara Motta, Roxani Krystalli and Phillip Schultz, and Marie Berry, and I recently had the distinct privilege of working with Q Manivannan and others to think through the politics and ethics of care in our world(s), to “celebrate spaces and practices of caring resistance, and speculate hopeful futures in the discipline of global politics”. Many people I know are tired, and in need of additional care, and this cannot help but resonate through our personal-political-professional lives in challenging ways – ways that we have to reckon with for our own survival and to sustain our ability to care for our selves and the others with whom we are entangled. I feel very fortunate to have these thinking resources to draw on.

The other field of scholarship from which I am learning a lot at the moment explores decolonial encounters in/with world politics. Some of these are deeply personal – like an utterly beautiful recent essay by my friend and colleague Monika Barthwal-Datta – and some focus their critique on the discipline and its adherents. I have enjoyed recent essays by Ahmad Rizky Mardhatillah Umar and Maïka Sondarjee and Nathan Andrews on this topic, and there are brilliant works from the last few years that have been profoundly influential on developing my thinking here, notably contributions by Meera Sabaratnam, Robbie Shilliam, and Olivia Rutazibwa. Of course, the insights offered by these brilliant thinkers have real resonance in my context, a place now known as Australia, where I live and work on land stolen from Aboriginal communities, and I have been trying to educate myself about decolonial movements and Indigenous knowledges since moving here in 2011 (Morgan Brigg, Mary Graham and Martin Weber published an extraordinarily good essay on this topic in 2021, which I recommend to everyone and teach with in my undergraduate IR classes now). I am working on a couple of projects now that have benefited enormously from engaging with these important debates and I am grateful to my collaborators and interlocutors who share this commitment to politically engaged scholarship on decoloniality from within the settler-colony we variously call “home”. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking? 

In some ways I think my understanding of the world has changed a lot, and then in other ways I feel like I still see the world the way I did when I was younger. Growing up in South London, I was aware of feminist politics and racial politics from an early age. The first Brixton uprising against racist and heavy-handed policing of Black men and boys was in 1981; I can remember fires and police lines and a feeling of being on edge, of confusion. My mum and her partner both taught in a local secondary school for kids with learning and behaviour support needs; most of the kids they taught had been involved with the........

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