Audrey Reeves

Audrey Reeves is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech. She  is currently working on a book manuscript,  Affect and World Politics: Governing Bodies, Hearts, and Minds at Museums and Memorials. This work uses feminist theories of affect and emotion to broaden understandings of security governance. Building on feminists’ insistence that politics is embodied, it suggests that security governance includes not only propositional forms of expertise and influence (e.g., military strategy, academic papers), but also affective and experiential knowledges passed on through organized bodily movement. Museum curators and architects intervene in security governance when they orchestrate bodily interactions with museum and memorial spaces. Those interactions generate powerful emotional experiences that shape citizens’ understandings of acceptable and unacceptable militarized activity. Thus, affective expertise plays an important role in democratic deliberation and consensus building surrounding the questions of the legitimate use of force.  

Reeves’ embodied and affective approach to the study of security politics draws inspiration from her training in classical and contemporary ballet. Over the past 20 years, she has trained at the Conservatoire de Danse de Montréal (Canada), Dance Area (Geneva, Switzerland), and with 3rd Stage Dance Company (Bristol, United Kingdom), inter alia. Since 2017, she is also a qualified Forrest Yoga Instructor.