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Expertise Summary
My research is interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary in nature. I work on the grey areas between media, philosophy, science and technology studies and politics. My interests include: the role of digital technologies, and more specifically, software, in shaping contemporary culture; micropolitics, untranslateability, and the philosophy of technology. I am particularly interested in institutional analysis, contemporary ecological philosophy, concepts of affect and environment, and am working on the planetary dimensions of computational culture and climate crisis. My work is informed more generally by a strong engagement with contemporary French philosophy and I have specific expertise in the work of Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Stengers and actor-network theory. I've supervised a wide-range of PhD projects: on comics and cultural theory, urban culture and the work of David Simon, Deleuze and information technology, artificial intelligence and the semiotics of CS Peirce, geographical information systems, the aesthetics of anonymity, cybertrooping, the grey media of Cold War command and control and Facebook. I'm currently supervising PhD research on, amongst other things, biopolitics and concepts of sovereignty, Walter Benjamin and anthropological materialism, Deleuze, literature and becoming-animal, and mythology and narratives of the end of the world.
Research Summary
I am currently finishing off a number of research and publications projects. I'm in the process of completing a book on the micropolitics of contemporary software culture, exploring the complex… read more
Current Research
I am currently finishing off a number of research and publications projects. I'm in the process of completing a book on the micropolitics of contemporary software culture, exploring the complex relations between programming practices and technologies and facets of contemporary society. I am also working on a monograph dealing with the work of Félix Guattari, which builds on work I have done on Guattari and, to a lesser extent, institutional analysis. I recently finished editing a translation of Isabelle Stengers' book Hypnosis between Science and Magic and my translation of Stengers' book The Virgin Mary and the Neutrino is scheduled for publication with Duke University Press soon.
Past Research
I have completed a number of research and publication projects. These include a project looking at the 'information revolution' in the NHS, a project looking at the globalisation of the mundane aesthetics of the creative and cultural industries, and an ESRC-funded project on the digital commons. With Roland Faber (Claremont College, LA), I edited The Allure of Things, a collection of essays on process and object-oriented approaches to philosophy, including work by Isabelle Stengers and by Graham Harman, amongst others. Prior to that I edited The Guattari Effect (with Éric Alliez), drawing together contemporary writings on the work of Félix Guattari, and co-authored Evil Media with Matthew Fuller, a book that explores the changing nature of media power, through a focus on the grey media technologies, techniques and practices of everyday life, and a number of translations, including Félix Guattari Schizonalytic Cartographies, Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre Capitalist Sorcery, David Lapoujade Powers of Time and Jean-Claude Polack Intimate Utopia. More recently I have been involved in commissioning book projects for the series Lines at Bloomsbury and developing work for the journal Computational Culture. I have an ongoing collaboration with the Public Programme at Nottingham Contemporary, which explores ideas about the intersections between art and ecology, and the challenges that decolonial thinking poses for artistic engagements with the Anthropocene.
Future Research
Along with ongoing research into digital media and the production of subjectivity, I am planning several projects for the future. One will explore the ecological dimensions of computational practices. I am also planning to extend my work on Guattari by engaging in a more detailed analysis of the connections of his work with that of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury and the current of thinking that developed around Institutional Psychotherapy in France during and after World War II.