Luke Lavender

Program
MA, Political Science

Supervisor
Dr. Simon Glezos (POLI)

Luke Lavender is an MA student in Political Science and CSPT. He is at Uvic in his capacity as an international student, having received his BA from the University of Exeter in the UK while also completing a year of study abroad at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München. His present areas of interest are on haptic politics, the phenomenon of touch and kinesthesia in social understanding, epistemology, political accounts of injury, and ethics, more specifically, care ethics. His present thesis is focusing on the disjunction between political action and political speech in contemporary and historical accounts of political participation. In seeking to disentangle action and speech as separate and disjunctive modes of political belonging Luke is understanding how marginalised, silenced, and ‘inactive’ populations do not just participate in the community to which they are putatively denied presence, but are indeed the clearest representatives of how political changes beyond the discursive arena (Luke finds himself transfixed with how non-discursive action is vital to discursive practice). In seeking to account for political actors who enact change without a substantial, or constantive, political grammar, Luke is engaging in the topic of silent protest to make clear just how we, as acting subjects, can performatively act beyond the conventional grammar of performative speech.