Amy Barlow is a PhD candidate in Politics at York University. Her interest in security studies began as an undergraduate where she studied European history, American history, American foreign policy, the Cold War, and global politics. Asymmetric conflict and insurgencies became my area of interest. Her Master’s thesis examined the reasons for the continuation of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – the lucrative sale of conflict minerals. Now as a PhD candidate her doctoral research examines the racialization of national security narratives. More specifically, she examines why Islamic fundamentalist terrorism continues to be considered the preeminent threat to national security in North America rather than white nationalist terrorism. Through discourse analysis she examines how governmental, mainstream media, and social media narratives generate highly racialized but seemingly commonsensical understandings of threats. Such an approach enables me to highlight the differential treatment of these terrorist threats in both countries. Ultimately, she argues that racial bias produces myopia in determining threats and has led to widespread Islamophobia thus producing the unintended consequence of an increase in white nationalist terrorism.
Barlow has accumulated over ten years of practical work experience conducting research. Her future goals are to continue research on terrorism by bringing together practical research skills and security expertise.
