Rate My Professor April Biccum

April Biccum is a Canadian-born Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations within Political Science at the Australian National University. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations, an MA in Critical Theory, and an Honours BA from the University of Nottingham. Biccum's research is framed by the Global Politics of Knowledge and Communication, focusing on how the concepts of Empire/Imperialism and Global Citizenship are used, theorized, and understood in public and scholarly domains. Her work on Empire/Imperialism combines conceptual history in the public sphere with theoretical mapping in the social sciences, emphasizing changes in epistemology, methodology, disciplinary framing, and comprehension of the international system when prioritizing Empire/Imperialism over state, system, or capital. On Global Citizenship, she pursues a theoretical and empirical approach, analyzing its theorization in social sciences scholarship and operationalization via Global Education Governance by elite international actors. These projects carry interdisciplinary implications for International Relations, Political Communication, International Political Sociology, political mobilization through social movements and global civil society, and critical views on citizenship, development, global governance, and the knowledge economy.

Biccum integrates postcolonial theory into International Relations studies, with emphasis on political communication, mobilization, and knowledge politics in Global Citizenship Education. She authored the book Global Citizenship and the Legacy of Empire: Marketing Development (2012), critiquing global citizenship's repoliticization through postcolonial lenses applied to political discourses. Key publications include 'Conceptualising a case, casing a concept? Two faces of global citizenship' (2025, Australian Journal of Political Science), 'Interpretation and political science in Australia' (2025), 'What do you need to know to live in the world? Global educational reform and the democratisation of knowledge' (2024, Globalisation, Societies and Education), 'Interpretivist methods in the digital age: methodologies and epistemologies' (2023, The Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism in Political Science), and 'What is an Empire? Assessing the postcolonial contribution to the American Empire Debate' (2018). As co-convenor of the Interpretation Method Critique Research Cluster at ANU, she advances interpretivist and critical methodologies in social sciences, including student capacity building. Biccum supervises higher degree research and Honours projects on political mobilisation, communication, Global Citizenship, Global Education Governance, Empire, and Imperialism. Her scholarship has accumulated over 600 citations.