Dr Mark Lacy

PhD Supervision Interests

critical security studies

European social theory (Zygmunt Bauman and Paul Virilio, in particular)
Emerging Threats

Current Teaching

PPR.425 Theorizing Security and War

PPR 221 Understanding Security and Global Politcs

 PPR 325 The Politics of Global Danger

PPR 100 Politics and Governance in the Contemporary World

Research Interests

I am currently writing a book on Paul Virilio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio ) for Routledge's PRIO series (http://www.routledge.com/books/series/prio_new_security_studies_PRIONEWSEC/ ) on critical security studies. The book covers the main themes in Virilio's work, examining his work on the militarization of everyday life and its consequences for contemporary debates on architecture, art, environmental danger, new security technologies, and the politics of the war on terror.

Before coming to Lancaster, I was an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded student at Sussex University: my research was focused on the problem of 'uncertainty' in debates over security politics and climate change, challenging the idea that we can 'geo-engineer' solutions to environmental risk or develop 'technical fixes' to master complex global problems, arguing that this desire to 'master' uncertainty was a symptom of what Virilio describes as 'technological fundamentalism.' Parts of the thesis were published in a book that attempted to highlight the inadequacy of thinking about uncertainty in International Relations, highlighting the 'technical fundamentalism' at play in supposedly Realist approaches to security and their inability to move beyond the temptations of Cold War-style thinking about geopolitical risk and Great Power Politics in a time when serious global insecurities emerge from the 'accidents' of an increasingly networked society: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415460040/.

I have taught courses at Sussex University, the University of Bristol and the Open University.

Office Hours

My office hours are Tuesday 3-5 and Thursday 4-5.

 

• PPR Academics Contribute Lectures to Multimedia Project

  18/05/2011
  Dr Mark Lacy (PPR) and Michael Dillon (Emeritus Professor of Politics, Lancaster and Distinguished Professor of Politics at Sehir University, Istanbul) have contributed some of the first lectures to a ... Read more»