Staff Profile

Background

I am interested in issues relating to security, mobility and space in Israel-Palestine. My research is ethnographic and interdisciplinary in nature and engages a range of methods to document hidden histories of violence as well as new and alternative spaces of action, interaction and contention. I am particularly interested in examining the material effects of state policies, urban planning projects, and interurban road networks upon patterns of mobility, mobilisation and policing as well as the ways in which ordinary patterns of everyday mobility within and across borders of different types can produce or can bring about possibilities of social, economic and political change more broadly. 

Qualifications

• DPhil in Government and International Affairs (Durham University)
• MA in Research Methods of the Middle East (Durham University)
• BA in Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies (Dublin City University) 

Past, current and future projects

My doctoral research was co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Sir Peter Ustinov Prejudice Fund and examined state attitudes towards Palestinian Christians in Israel. It focused on police responses to instances of intra-communal violence in Nazareth and other mixed Arab villages in the Galilee. This work was published with Mediterannean Politics (2010) and resulted in my first book with Routledge (2011). It also paved the way for a two year Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship focusing on urban policing and the policing of Palestinian protest in Israel. The results of this were published with International Political Sociology (2016), Security Dialogue (2016) and Political Geography (2017).

My current research examines the relationship between security, mobility and space, focusing in particular on the transformative power and potential of everyday cross-border movements in Israel-Palestine. This includes work on the politics of social or recreational running in Jerusalem (Mobilities) as well as investigations of Palestinian educational (student) mobilities more generally. 

Alongside my ongoing research interest in issues relating to security, mobility and space, I remain committed to ethnographic research methods and methodologies as a means of centering minorities, peripheral groups and social-political margins in mainstream scholarship.   

Areas of potential research supervision:

• Contentious politics, social movements, mobilisation and protest
• Ethnopolitics, ethnic minority rights and struggles
• Urban planning, policing and surveillance
• Security, mobility and space
• Borders, border spaces, cross-border mobilities
• The politics of everyday life 
• Ethnographic research methods

Funding

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship 

Sir Peter Ustinov Prejudice Scholarship

Economic and Social Research Council (1 3) Studentship

Council for British Research in the Levant Award

Ginsburg-Ingerman Scholarship

Undergraduate Teaching

POL2012: Politics of the Middle East

POL3099: Power, Security and Protest in the Middle East

Teaching Awards

• McGahern U. Cross-border mobilities: mobility capital and the capital accumulation strategies of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Mobilities 2023.
• McGahern U. The Struggle to be Seen and Heard in Israel–Palestine. Geopolitics 2020, 25(1), 267-271.
• McGahern U. Making Space on the Run: Exercising the Right to Move in Jerusalem. Mobilities 2019, 14(6), 890-905.
• McGahern U. Protesting at the crossroads: Framing ‘in-between places’ in spatial analyses of contention. Political Geography 2017, 59, 92-102.
• McGahern U. 'They go to get a gun': Hidden histories of violence and the politics of rumour in Israel. Security Dialogue 2016, 47(6), 481-497.
• McGahern U. Spatial Regimes of Power: Combined Municipal Policing in the Arab City of Nazareth. International Political Sociology 2016, 10(3), 206-222.
• McGahern U. Palestinian Christians in Israel: State attitudes towards non-Muslims in a Jewish State. Oxon: Routledge, 2011.
• McGahern U. The limits of dissent: Palestinian media in a Jewish ethnocracy. Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 2011, 4(1), 79-93.
• McGahern U. Multicultural norms and strategies: Minority policy in an ethnocratic state. Mediterranean Politics 2010, 15(3), 415-433.