Hi and welcome.
I’m a lecturer (like an assistant professor) in government at Flinders University in Adelaide. I teach primarily in the undergraduate Bachelor of International Relations and Political Science (BIRPS) program. I joined Flinders at the beginning of 2024, and although I grew up in Australia, I had never set foot in Adelaide before.
Prior to this, I lived in New York for 12 years. I received my doctorate from the City University of New York, and taught at Hunter College while I was studying. After graduating, I worked as a lecturer (but not like an assistant prof) in the writing program at Princeton University.
My main area of research is crime and in/security in Latin America. This research is informed by time living in Mexico during the war on narcotrafficking, as violence worsened and confidence in the government’s tough-on-crime policies ebbed away. My longest-running project examines the “narco-messages” that criminal groups display in public places to threaten rivals, denounce the government, and to (claim to) represent the public. This research has yielded a number of publications, including articles in Perspectives on Politics and Comparative Political Studies. A full book project based on this research, entitled Outlaw Infamy: Making and Marketing Cartels in Mexico is under consideration with an academic press.
A newer area of research brings together work on infrastructure projects and populism. This is an unusual pairing, given that infrastructure is often associated with the material realities of state building and development, while populism is seen as a performative political style that can destabilize political systems. I find that these disparate ideas come together in the Tren Maya, a megaproject in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and the signature initiative of the popular, populist former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This newer research has led to working papers on the Tren Maya itself, on performative populism more generally, and on data centers as a distinctive infrastructural challenge.
Alongside this research, I try to find time for public writing. In the last few years I’ve written about the work of Mexican authors in translation, including Fernanda Melchor, Yuri Herrera, and Álvaro Enrigue.
Philip Luke Johnson 