I recently read about a man called David Eubank, a US veteran who runs a Christian humanitarian army in Mosul, Iraq. He was a special forces soldier in the US Army for much of his career and now heads a team of former soldiers in Mosul and previously Burma. His organisation in Iraq rescues civilians […]
Burial at Sea
During 2016, artists across Ireland presented work that sought to commemorate the Easter Rising and the changes that a century has brought to the nation. As part of an Irish Composers’ Collective concert held in November 2016, I curated a concert entitled Speaking with the Past, which aimed at creating ambitious and challenging new works for mezzo […]
Threads and Traces
Threads and Traces is a work for solo viola and ensemble that explores the space between notes and the traces they leave behind. It was premiered by Sebastian Adams and the Kirkos Ensemble during the annual Irish Composers’ Collective Takeover concert on 13th November 2015. The first movement, Chorale, features a slow and meditative viola […]
Casement opera
With support from the Arts Council of Ireland, I will be spending 2015 developing and writing the libretto and score for a brand new opera based on the life of Irish revolutionary Roger Casement. A deeply contentious figure in Irish history, Casement will make a fascinating subject for a dark and probing opera. For some […]
Intaglio to be performed at West Cork Chamber Music Festival
My fears that taking on a full-time internship in a field entirely unrelated to music – namely human rights – would herald the demise of my musical output seem to have been misplaced, at least for the meantime. In April, I entered the West Cork Chamber Music Festival Composers’ Bursary, and found out a few […]
New opera scene and libretto: The Wood That Weeps
Late last year I wrote a scene for an opera I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. The opera is going to be based on the life of Roger Casement and it’s something I initially decided to write an opera about around 5 years ago. For some reason it’s been a struggle trying […]
Aesthetics of Wilderness and Sovereignty: The Arctic Ocean between artistic representation and political performance
…or, on writing a failed PhD Proposal… Following on from my MA in international relations (IR), I recently applied for funding to do a PhD at the department of Geography at Durham University. For some, geography may seem a stretch from IR, but it isn’t really: these days geography is split into physical geography and […]
Is it time for neo-classical economics to give way to green IPE?
Introduction In this short essay I wish to discuss the importance and relevance of green International Political Economy (IPE) as a discourse and discuss its relative strengths and weaknesses. In the first section I discuss the most prevalent form of economic analysis in the world today, that of neo-classical/neo-liberal economics, and discuss its relationship to […]
What I’m working on – ‘Casement’
Having just completed the dissertation element for my MA in International Relations – 16,000 words written, hundreds of thousands read, 4 months of research, many new wrinkles and a further receded hairline – which challenged Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereign power and bare life by suggesting that we can theorise the act of self-immolation in […]
Development Identities: Identity, ‘development’ practices, and the (re)creation of power structures
Introduction In this essay I consider the discursive categories of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ states within the frame of International Political Economy (IPE) taking a poststructuralist theoretical approach. I argue that the discursive construction of developed/underdeveloped identities attempts to depoliticise structural imbalances and inequalities in the global economy and present these identities as pre-existent and natural. […]