Swani R. Keelson is a Doctor of International Affairs and a semiotician whose research examines the symbolic architecture of global governance. Her recent doctoral thesis, Paper Tigers: Deconstruction and Semiotics of Gender Equity as Signifier in Water Governance Policies – A Case Study in Ghana (Johns Hopkins SAIS, 2025), introduces a pioneering framework that applies Derridean deconstruction and semiotic theory to interrogate how policy language performs gender equity without enforcing it. Keelson’s work bridges post-structuralist theory, critical policy analysis, and African development studies, offering new tools for decoding performative governance and the semiotics of institutional reform.
