Dr Alasdair Pinkerton is Reader (Associate Professor) in Geopolitics in the Department of Geography.

Office Hours

Mondays: 09.30-10.30: MS Teams Link

Wednesdays: 16.00-17.00: MS Teams Link

Research profile:

My research examines the interaction of popular culture and foreign/security policy and practices, with a particular focus on the UK, Commonwealth, and British Overseas Territories. This work has been funded via grants totalling over £500k, and is supported by high-impact publications, supervised/funded PhD projects, and invited national and international talks.

My research and teaching is focussed through three research sub-themes:

1. Geopolitics of Media and Communications: With an international reputation as a leading scholar in this area, Alasdair developed this area of specialism with an ESRC-funded PhD research and British Academy-funded postdoctoral projects exploring radio as a geopolitical instrument of propaganda, persuasion, diplomacy, influence and state power;
2. Geopolitics of No Man’s Land: Driven by an interest in ‘citizen statecraft’ and the everyday ways in which the geopolitical world is represented and communicated to publics/citizens, this interest examines the genealogy of “no man’s land” – a term/concept that has entered everyday language and become synonymous with global spaces that resist diplomatic or military resolution;
3. Heritage, Brexit and the Overseas Territories: This future-looking research explores the issues of ‘Brexit’ and ‘heritage’, and the implications for the UK’s relationship with the Overseas Territories and the wider Commonwealth – not least as the UK seeks to narrate itself as ‘Global Britain’.

Research papers have been published in a wide range of journals, including Political Geography, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Twentieth Century British History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Progress in Human Geography. My first book, Radio: Making Waves in Sound (2019) is a ground-breaking political/cultural history of the world's original electornic means of communication, and published by Reaktion in collaboration with The Science Museum in London.

In 2013, I served as an accredited observer of the Falkland Islands referendum, and appear frequently in the UK and international media on issues related to global geopoltiics, including the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar and the UK's Overseas Territories.