Alan Ingram's research examines the ways in which geopolitical events are constituted and contested as matters of public and political concern. His work explores how diverse actors frame and enact geopolitical events within particular political, aesthetic and material practices and considers their wider implications.

Ingram’s research has focused on three major events and divergent responses to them. His early career work examined how, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian nationalists and geopolitical theorists pursued the idea that Russia was a divided nation involved an existential struggle with the West. His second project explored the geopolitical and security implications of emerging infectious diseases, focusing on the contrasting ways in which activists, policy makers and media in Britain and the US framed the HIV/AIDS pandemic as an exceptional event requiring exceptional responses. More recently, his research has examined the ways in which Britain’s role inthe 2003 Iraq war has been addressed by artists, curators and activists, forming critical and creative counterpoints to official accounts, inquiries and memorials.

Much of Ingram’s thinking on geopolitical events is crystallized in his 2019 book Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain’s Iraq War Through Art,which explores diverse perspectives on the war and maps out new ways of thinking about and researching geopolitics, art and events in relation to each other. His current research extends his interest in ideas of the West and in how knowledge about geopolitical events is constituted and contested via public practices, with particular reference to relations between Russia and Britain and wider concerns about the politics of truth.