Rate My Professor Umut Ozguc

Dr. Umut Ozguc is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University, affiliated with the Applied AI Research Centre. She holds a PhD and an MA (Research) from the University of New South Wales. Ozguc is a critical International Relations (IR) scholar whose research interests include border politics, critical security studies, international relations theory, border walls and carceral geographies, human security, and digital borders and migration governance. She specializes in border politics and mobilities, engaging with critical border and security studies, human security, International Political Sociology (IPS), and critical methods in International Relations. Her current research focuses on AI and automated systems in migration and border governance, and the multiplication of borders and bordering technologies. She teaches units such as Introduction to Global Politics, Security in World Politics, and International Law in Global Politics, and is open to supervising research students on critical border and security studies and critical methodologies in IR.

Prior to her current role, Ozguc served as Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University from 2020 to 2022, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales Canberra from 2019 to 2020, and held lecturer and researcher positions at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. At Macquarie, she is Program Director of the Master of International Relations (2024–2026), Program Leader for Digital Border and AI Adaptation at the Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence, co-founder and co-convenor of the Australian Critical Border Studies Network, and co-chair of the Women's Caucus of the Australian Political Studies Association (2024–2026). Her awards include a teaching award from the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University (2018) and the 2022 ANU Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry Early Career Research Grant for her project 'Mobility injustices, racialised bodies, and Australia’s pandemic borders.' Key publications comprise 'Decolonising the psychology curriculum: perspectives from faculty at a UK university' (Teaching in Higher Education, 2026), ''Broadening' and 'deepening' collective security in times of health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond' (International Relations, 2025), 'A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh–India Borderlands' (International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2024), 'The world-making power of borders: Asia-Pacific perspectives' (Political Geography, 2024), and 'Border hotels: spaces of detention and quarantine' (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2023). Her scholarship has appeared in leading outlets including Security Dialogue, International Studies Review, Geopolitics, International Political Sociology, and Political Geography.