Dr Delacey Tedesco

My work centres on contemporary claims about transitions in politics, with a particular interest in tracing the enactments of global politics in seemingly minor contexts: local politics, built environments, aesthetic practices, and personal interactions. I work with a range of transdisciplinary methods, crossing politics, geography, and aesthetics, to understand the forces that stabilize and destabilize modern configurations of politics and international relations. I am drawn to points of perceived insecurity, such as local/global urbanization and settler coloniality/decolonization, and to phenomena often dismissed as cultural or ephemeral, such as fashion, through which people intervene in these seemingly abstract or reified process. I am fascinated by the challenge of trying to study and engage politics in times and places when the core of the term has been brought into question. While my work primarily intersects critical political and international relations theory and critical urban and geopolitics, I avidly work across environmental political theory, postcolonial theory, critical security studies, and political aesthetics.

My teaching is grounded in the belief that to truly excel, students need to be challenged, engaged, and supported, and so my courses combine research-led instruction, community-connected learning, and professional skills development. I have taught across political theory and urban, political, and human geography. In my classes I emphasize students' capacity to connect course material to their lived contexts, working to bring the world into our debates and working wherever possible to take students out into the world, through field trips and other activities. I am well-prepared to supervise postgraduate students in international relations theory, critical political geography, poststructuralist political theory, urban and international political ecology, settler-colonialism and decolonization in the Global North, and everyday politics of security/insecurity.

I am from the unceded Syilx territory of the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. This is a beautiful agricultural region, specializing in tree fruits and world-class wines, and I have been fortunate to live and work on that land and with the people, both Indigenous and settler-Identified, who are trying to build new relations there.

I left the Okanagan to complete my Bachelors in Political Science (Honours) at the University of Victoria. During that period I attended the University of Exeter for a year as an exchange student. After graduation I worked for four years as a fundraiser and grants manager at non-profit agencies in Vancouver, including three years with the David Suzuki Foundation, a leading environmental research and advocacy organization in Canada. I returned to the University of Victoria to undertake my Masters in Political Science (with an additional specialization in Contemporary Social and Political Thought) from 2004-2006 and then entered the Doctoral Program there. Again, I took advantage of the opportunities to travel as part of my studies, this time undertaking a term as a research student with the School of Politics, International Relations, and the Environment (SPIRE) at Keele University. I defended my Doctoral dissertation in January 2016, but spent most of my doctoral program living and working in Kelowna, the largest city in the Okanagan territory.

I had the opportunity to teach urban, human, and political geography with the Community, Culture, and Global Studies unit at the Okanagan Campus of the University of British Columbia, which is located in Kelowna. During this time, I worked to connect my research on global urbanization to the settler colonial history of Kelowna's past and present.

I am so happy to return to the University of Exeter, now as a faculty member. I have relocated to Cornwall with my family, and in breaks from transitioning my teaching and research to this new context, we are exploring all the wonders Cornwall has to offer, from the beaches and paths to the towns and people.