Agenda

Interview
1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity. 
I am Michael Magcamit, Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Global Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. My scholarly work examines the often-unseen forces that shape international security, conflict, trade, and foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific. My primary research is situated within Critical Security Studies, with particular expertise in violent conflict, international trade, and foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific. Across these areas, I investigate the subtle yet consequential forces that structure political life: affect and ethnoreligious nationalism in violent conflict, insecurity and anxiety in international trade, and populism and securitisation in foreign policy. My research projects on ethnoreligious othering and violent conflict, and on the (in)security politics of international trade—funded respectively by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade—resulted in two monographs: Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford University Press) and Small Powers and Trading Security (Palgrave/Springer, 2016 and 2018). My broader work on the non-traditional dimensions of international security has appeared, in leading journals including International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, and International Affairs, among others.
 2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay.
This visiting period at Ca’ Foscari offers an ideal intellectual setting in which to advance the project I am currently developing on the political lifecycle of populist leaders. Building directly on my earlier work on affect, othering, insecurity, and securitisation, the project comparatively examines the populist politics of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Donald Trump in the United States. It asks how populist power is not only won electorally, but also sustained, normalised, and reactivated through interlocking performative, affective, and discursive mechanisms. In doing so, the project seeks to generate new theoretical and empirical insights for comparative populism studies by developing and testing my proposed framework of “populist othering”. This framework explains how populist leaders construct antagonistic political communities and why non-material and non-institutional forces – such as fear, resentment, fantasy, identity, and symbolic performance – are as consequential as material and institutional factors in shaping elections, governing practices, and their political afterlives. Ca’ Foscari is particularly well suited to this work because of its strong interdisciplinary environment and its location in Venice, a city that offers a unique vantage point for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, identity, and transnational exchange. The Department’s expertise in comparative cultural analysis, politics, language, and society provides an especially productive context for refining the project’s conceptual vocabulary and expanding its comparative reach, particularly in relation to European populism and Italy’s contemporary political landscape. More broadly, my expertise in the (in)security politics of peace, development, trade, and foreign policy can contribute to the vibrant research culture in three main ways: first, by producing a book on populist othering and the performative, affective and discursive mechanisms underpinning it; second, by presenting seminars and/or helping organise a roundtable panel on the performance, affect, and discourse of populist politics; and third, by participating in public knowledge-transfer and impact activities with colleagues and researchers at Ca’ Foscari.