Dr Audrey Alejandro

Dr Audrey Alejandro

Associate Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis

Department of Methodology

Room No
CON.2.14
Office Hours
Please refer to Student Hub for details
Connect with me

Languages
English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Key Expertise
Discourse, Knowledge, International Political Sociology, Reflexivity

About me

Audrey Alejandro is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology. She completed her PhD in Political Science at Sciences Po Bordeaux in 2016. Prior to joining LSE in 2018, she was a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.

Research Expertise

Audrey’s work is interdisciplinary and encompasses International Relations, Sociology and Political Science. She is passionate about her research which specialises in the politics of discourse and knowledge. Theoretically, her interest lies in developing concepts to capture the fundamental processes through which discourse and knowledge shape the world we live in. She does so through a wide range of case studies including the medicalisation of male circumcision as an anti-HIV policy, Eurocentrism in the social sciences, or the climatization of public policy and nation-branding in small states, and country cases such as Brazil, India, Senegal or the Commonwealth of Dominica. Methodologically, her area of expertise is twofold. On the one hand, she strives to develop new methods and research designs to refine our empirical understanding of these phenomena (e.g., multi-method qualitative text and discourse analysis, computational discourse analysis...). On the other, she aims to expand our methodological toolbox to better account for the role we play as researchers and teachers in reproducing or challenging socio-political orders through the discourse and knowledge we produce and those we have been socialised in (methods for reflexivity in practice, methodology of writing, serious games).

Audrey is co-convener of the International Political Sociology research group Doing IPS and co-founder and co-editor of the Palgrave book series Trends in European IR. She held visiting positions at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, and at the Instituto de Relações Internacionais, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

She is also a dedicated teacher and was awarded a LSE Excellence in Education award in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, a LSE Class Teacher Award in 2017, and nominated for the LSE Student Union Teaching Awards in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 in the categories "Inspirational Teaching", "Innovative Teaching", “Excellent Feedback and Communication”, and “Outstanding Teaching”.

"My favourite experience is teaching the module Qualitative Text and Discourse Analysis that I designed. Every year I am so excited about learning from [the students] how the module has been a transformative experience that helped them rethink their role in society as social agents who can use what they learned to transform themselves and the way they speak the world into being."

-  Dr Audrey Alejandro shares the most enjoyable aspect of her work as part of our 30th Anniversary celebrations. Read the full close-up with Methodology faculty

 

Dr Alejandro welcomes PhD proposals in areas including:

International political sociology, discourse, knowledge, qualitative text and discourse analysis, creative methods, reflexivity, sociology and anthropology of knowledge, science, and technology, transnational and global politics.

Expertise Details

Politics of knowledge; Politics of discourse; International Political Sociology; International Relations; Reflexivity; Methodology of writing; Creative methods; Serious games; Multi-method research design; Qualitative Text and Discourse Analysis.

Selected publications

Audrey Alejandro, Conceptualizing technicization: the history of the medicalization of male circumcision. European Journal of International Relations. ISSN 1354-0661 (In Press), 2025.

Audrey Alejandro, Writing as social practice: from researchers’ to readers’ reflexivity. Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS), 2025.

Audrey Alejandro and Alexander Stoffel, Reflexivity for qualitative research quality and the quality of reflexivity. In: Flick, Uwe, (ed.) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Quality. SAGE Publications, London, 2024.

Eleanor Knott and Audrey Alejandro, From conceptual misalignment to reconceptualizing: demonstrating the process of reconceptualization. Global Studies Quarterly, 4 (3), 2024. 

Audrey Alejandro and Joshua Feldman, The discursive process of resemantisation: how global health discourses turned male circumcision into an anti-HIV policyInternational Relations, [online first], 2024.

Audrey Alejandro, Lucile Maertens, Zoé Cheli, Augustin Fragnière, Oriane Sarrasin, Designing role-play simulations for climate change decision-making: A step-by-step approach to facilitate cooperation between science and policy Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 152, 2024, 103650.

Audrey Alejandro and Longxuan Zhao, ​Multi-Method Qualitative Text and Discourse Analysis: A Methodological FrameworkQualitative Inquiry, 2023, 30(6), 461-473.

Audrey Alejandro, How to Problematise Categories: Building the Methodological Toolbox for Linguistic ReflexivityInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2021, online.

Audrey Alejandro, Reflexive discourse analysis: A methodology for the practice of reflexivity, European Journal of International Relations, 27, 1, 2021, 150-174.

Audrey Alejandro, Western dominance in International Relations? The Internationalisation of IR in Brazil and India, London, UK and New York: Routledge, 2019. Chapter outline, podcast and reviews.

My research