Who we are

Drawing on a background in literary history and cultural studies, Cathy Bergin's primary research interests are in the politics of 'race' and colonialism in  African-American and Caribbean writing, focussing on cultural formations and Communist politics in the 20th Century. She is particularly interested in the concept of 'rage' as the expression of black historical consciousness and agency.

Cathy has lectured in historical and critical studies at the university since 2005 and organises the long-standing Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics research seminar series.

Bob Brecher is a moral and political philosopher with special interests in the philosophical issues surrounding conflict, torture and medicine, and in the ethics of education.

Tom Bunyard’s primary research interests are focussed on the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and on Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. In 2011, he completed a PhD on this topic at Goldsmiths, University of London. The thesis traced the genealogy of Debord’s theory, interpreted it through its primary theoretical and philosophical influences, and foregrounded the central importance of time, history and praxis to Debord’s thought. Tom has recently completed a monograph on this topic. Titled Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory, the book reconstructs and evaluates the conceptual framework that underlies Debord’s claims. In doing so, it places particular emphasis on the Hegelian and existential dimensions of Debord’s work, and focusses on his concerns with historical agency.

This study of the Debord’s work has led to an interest in the temporality of modern society, and related notions of social pathology. Tom is currently pursuing this by looking at new readings of Hegel’s philosophy, and at contemporary ‘value-form’ interpretations of Marx’s mature work. More broadly, his interests include: Marx and Marxism; Hegelian philosophy; existentialism; aesthetics and the avant-garde; continental philosophy; cultural and critical theory; philosophy of history.

My research interests are centred on politics and international relations in the Middle East and, in this regional context, in particular on: activism in repressive contexts; student movements and the political role of universities; and transnational solidarity.

1.       Activism in repressive contexts

I am particularly interested in how people pursue activism in contexts of extreme repression, including under military occupation. This work intersects with my broader interest on social movements and mobilisation. As part of this research interest, I have published on Palestinian political activism under occupation, including resistance practiced by university students (in Resistance and the Practice of Rationality) and through cultural institutions. My recent article for Critical Military Studies explores the activism at work in the Palestinian Museum and contributes to emerging academic work that seeks to highlight the role of museums in International Relations.

2.       Student movements and the political role of universities

I have a long-standing research interest in student activism. My doctoral thesis (which was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) focused on Palestinian student activism in Palestinian, Israeli and British universities. I subsequently led the British Academy funded project in Higher Education and Political Change in the Arab World which focused on the teaching of social sciences at Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian universities in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, and the political setting and impact of this teaching. Together with Juliet Millican, I have published work on the role of universities and students in conflict and post-conflict situations and under occupation.

3.       Transnational Solidarity

My research interest in transnational solidarity is currently being pursued through the on-going Radical Sixties project that seeks to bring transnational solidarity (particularly across, and with, anticolonial struggles) to the fore in analyses of politics in the 1960s. Beginning with the 2019 international conference ‘The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politic and Histories of Solidarity’ held at the University of Brighton, the project has continued through a 2020 workshop on radical politics and transnational solidarity in the “Long Sixties”. I am currently co-editing a book, with Dr Zeina Maasri and Dr Cathy Bergin, provisionally titled Transnational Solidarity: Decentring the Radical Sixties, based on papers developed from these events with other selected contributors.

Additional roles

I am a member of the managing committee for the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton and, together with Dr Deanna Dadusc, I lead CAPPE’s Social Movements and Radical Global Politics strand. I currently co-convene the “work in progress” seminar series on Social Movements and Radical Politics and I encourage researchers working in these areas who are interested in presenting work in this series to contact me by email.

Dr. Nicola Clewer is a lecturer in the School of Humanities. Her research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. More specifically, her work to date has interrogated the philosophical, political and aesthetic dimensions of memorialisation in the neoliberal conjuncture. Her current research explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the rise of the far-right through the lens of the aesthetic concept of the sublime.

Dr. Deanna Dadusc is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Applied Social Science.

Her research analyses the criminalisation of social movements in Europe, including the criminalisation of migrants' solidarity and of housing struggles. Her research is informed by critical approaches to criminology addressing state, corporate and border violence from feminist and anti-racist perspectives. 

Together with Dr. Eleni Dimou and Prof. Pierpaolo Mudu, Deanna is currently co-authoring a book titled ‘’Borders, Repression and Resistance: the criminalisation of migrants’ solidarity’’ (Routledge, forthcoming).

Deanna paricipates in the Erasmus+ BRIDGES consortium, which brings together Universities and Civil Society organisations to tackle exclusion and discrimination in Higher Education, by using decolonial, anti-racist and feminist approaches and methodologies. The consortium includes the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research and Za’atar in Athens;  the domestic workers union Sindillar and the Autonomous University of Barcelona; An.Ge.Kommen and the University of Giessen in Germany; the University of Brighton and the Office of Displaced Designers in the UK.

Deanna coordinates the 'Social Movements and Radical Politics' strand of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE - University of Brighton).

I write about and research contemporary critical theories and radical politics. This includes work in continental philosophy, populism, radical forms of politics and protest, discourse theory and deconstruction and the politics of inequality.

Robin Dunford's research addresses humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect, human rights, and decolonial ethics.

 1.     Civilian Protection, Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect

With Michael Neu (University of Brighton), Dunford is the author of Just War and the Responsibility to Protect: A Critique. This book argues that debates on Just War and the Responsibility to Protect fail to consider already existing forms of intervention – including arms trading, attempts to stoke ethnic tension, and measures that destroy the environment – that contribute to the emergence of humanitarian crises including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. Dunford and Neu co-ordinate an emerging network which looks at how nonviolent approaches offer a more effective and justifiable alternative for protecting civilian victims of atrocity crimes.

2.     Human Rights and the Politics of Resistance

Dunford has written on social movement claims for human rights, focusing in particular on recent moves towards a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Through a series of articles and a monograph entitled The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle, he has called for greater recognition within the Human Rights Council of the new collective rights demanded by activists. 

 3.     Decolonial  Ethics

The third project shows how a Decolonial ethics centred on the idea of ‘pluriversality’ – a world in which many worlds fit – offers a persuasive alternative to the cosmopolitan perspective that sits at the centre of contemporary Global Ethics. Having outlined central features of a decolonial global ethics in an article in the Journal of Global Ethics, Dunford is now exploring how a decolonial perspective can reframe debates concerning environmental ethics, food justice, and development ethics.

 4. Law, Ethics and Democracy

With Dr Lara Montesinos Coleman, Dunford co-ordinates the Law, Ethics and Democracy Collective: an action-research initiative between scholars at the Universities of Brighton and Sussex. The Project, which was founded in 2016, aims to bring together work in applied philosophy and political theory with struggles against the increasingly fascistic, anti-democratic and dubiously-legal forms of economy and government we encounter today. 

Additional Roles: 

Together with Professor Professor Bob Brecher and Dr Michael Neu, Dunford edits a book series with Rowman and Littlefield. Off the Fence: Morality, Politics, Society publishes short, sharply argued texts in applied moral and political philosophy, with an interdisciplinary focus. Robin is also co-convenor of the British International Studies Association's Ethics and World Politics working group.

I work across the fields of visual and cultural politics and design history with a particular attention on Lebanon and the Middle East. My investigation is historically focused on post-1945 anticolonial struggles, transnational anti-imperialist solidarities and violent conflicts, as complicated by a global Cold War order. I approach the Middle East less as a discrete area study but rather as a political geography interconnected with global conditions of modernity, (post)coloniality, war and conflict.

I am currently completing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, due in 2021. More broadly, my work encompasses psychoanalysis, care theory, cultural studies and critical theory. I am interested in psychoanalysis as a practice of care, and in the relationship betwen care practices and politics. I have a particular interest in the work of Winnicott, psychoanalytic feminism, and understanding and theorising the relationship between psychoanalysis, politics and modernity.

Andy Knott works in political theory, with a specific interest in political subjects, especially individualism and the people of populism, as well as debates across contemporary democratic theory.

Current research is focused on populism, with an interest in drawing on theoretical, historical and contemporary accounts of this complex political phenomenon. Recent projects have involved: the thorny question of defining populism; analysing populism's beginnings; left-wing populism; and, populism and political subjects.

Andy is also working on a longer-term historical project on individualism, drawing in Hobbes, Locke, Defoe and Swift, Smith, Bentham, Mill, Hobhouse, Hayek and other neoliberals.

Research interests also include Laclau, Mouffe, discourse theory, radical democracy, and their roots in the likes of Machiavelli and Gramsci.

Anthony Leaker has a background in literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein and contemporary North American fiction. 

His research on contemporary fiction is primarily focused on the critique of neoliberal work practices. His work on Wittgenstein examines the political aesthetics of his later philosophy. He also researches on questions of cultural representation and transnational populist politics. He is currently writing a book on Free Speech. 

My academic research and expertise is wideranging. While my PhD work focused on epistemology and metaphysics in Kant's theoretical philosophy, I have research interest in German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism, the Frankfurt School, Critical Realism, Speculative Realism, Marxist political economy and social theory, post-foundational political theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, and the historical and ideological roots of liberalism and conservatism.   

Dr Victoria Margree is a specialist in the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in women's writing and feminist theory.

Her monograph British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness (Palgrave, 2019) explores how the ghost story functioned as a public forum for negotiating women's changing experiences across the period of first wave feminism. It looks at stories by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit, Alice Perrin, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt.

She has also published a book on the second wave feminist theorist, Shulamith Firestone (Zero Books, 2018); and co-edited an essay collection on fin de siècle popular fiction author, Richard Marsh (MUP, 2018). She is co-founder of the Short Story Network, a network for researchers of the short story of the long 19th century.

Her current projects include work on the philosophy of friendship and on reproductive politics.

Dr Michael Neu researches in political and moral philosophy, with special interests in the politics and ethics of violence. He has published on contemporary just war theory, the "Responsibility to Protect", sweatshops, torture and the notion of "complicity". His current research is on "friendship".

I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Brighton, where I teach critical theory and political philosophy. My research interests include French and Italian contemporary philosophy and thought, Black studies, Biopolitics, the politics of War and violence and political theology. In my first book The political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben (London:Bloomsbury, 2019) I interrogate the relation between radical philosophy, archaeology and political ontology. Indeed, I am interested in the ways in which forms of relational ontology underpin the history of contemporary critical theory and radical philosophy.

My recent publications include:  ‘Violence, Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the work of Giorgio Agamben’ in Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala eds. The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (Routledge: 2019);  Primera, G and Lamb, M. 'Sovereignty between the Katechon and the Eschaton: Rethinking the Leviathan' in Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary N.187, 2019; Primera, G. (2019) ‘Introduction to the Thought of Roberto Esposito’ in An Italian Philosophy Reader, eds. D. Rose and M. Lewis. London;; New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. [forthcoming]; Primera, G. (2016) ‘Economic theology, Governance and Neoliberalism: The lessons of The Kingdom and the Glory’ in Praktyka Teoretyczna, Vol 2, 2016. I am currently co-editing a special issue for the Journal of Italian Philosophy entitled ‘The Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Inoperativity’. 

 In previous years, I have written and published about neoliberalism, sovereignty and governmentality from the perspective of French Poststructuralism and Italian Thought. I have presented this work at specialised conferences in New York, Madrid, Bristol, Palermo and Brighton with some of the leading scholars in radical theory. Moreover, through my research on political violence and biopolitics, I have approached questions surrounding the notion of exclusion and its relation to liberal democracy. This work has allowed me to take part in post-marxist debates on Populism and radical democracy that have taken place in Buenos Aires (2015) and Brighton (2016 and 2017) within the framework of the project: Transnational Populist Politics.

Conference Presentations

• Political Theology and Inoperativity” in The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Joint Annual Conference, Royal Holloway, London, August 26th-27th 2019

• ‘Logistics, Biopolitics and Ordering’ in Violence, Space and the Political, National University of Ireland. Galway June 7th – 9th 2018

• ‘The signature of Secularization: The profane philosophy of Giorgio Agamben’ in London Conference in Critical Thought, London South Bank University. London, June 30th - July 1st 2017

• 'Violence, biopolitics and resistance: the meaning of violence in the work of Giorgio Agamben’ In The Meaning of Violence: International Conference. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Madrid 7th -8th March 2017

• ‘Resisting Biopolitics: Destituent Power and inoperativity’ in British Political Studies Association Conference. Hosted by CAPPE, University of Brighton. Brighton, 21st -23rd March 2016.

• ‘Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia’ in Theorising Transnational Populist Politics. Buenos Aires, 30th September – 5th October 2015.

• ‘Disposable life and neoliberalism’ in Neoliberalism and everyday life, CAPPE Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton. Brighton, September 2014.

• ‘The signature of Life: From Butler’s social ontology to Agamben’s politicization of ontology’ In Ontologies of Conflict, Critical Studies research Group. Brighton, June 2014.

• ‘Neoliberalism, Governmentality and Bare life: Homo Oeconomicus and Homo Sacer’ in Agamben, Capital, and the Homo Sacer Series: Economy, Poverty, People, Work. ACLA- New York University. New York, March 2014.

• ‘Agamben, the proper and the improper: understanding the scope of the inclusion- exclusion paradigm’ in Italian Biopolitical Theory: Life Power and Political Theology, University of West England. Bristol, 13-14 March 2014

• ‘Extra-judicial killings and bare life in Colombia’ in Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence, University of Brighton. Brighton, February 2014.

Raphael’s research is in the areas of protest and social movements, criminology and criminal justice, and social and political theory. He is the author of a book on European social movements (Against Old Europe, Routledge) and he has published widely on protest, policing and critical theory. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as Citizenship Studies, Critical Social Policy, Social Movement Studies, Environmental Politics, Sociology Compass and the European Journal of Social Theory.

He currently leads a research project that scrutinises the public inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales, with initial funds coming from Brighton University's Rising Stars Award. Raphael was interviewed about the research on the European TV network ARTE and has provided expert commentary on the delays and secrecy clouding the inquiry in the Independent, the Conversation and a range of blogs.

Previously he has received the Colin Seymour-Ure prize for his undergraduate thesis from the University of Kent, a four-year studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for his doctoral research at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham.

Raphael currently serves on the Editorial Board of Sociology Research Online (since 2015) and on the Management Board of the university's Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics. He is a member of the British Society of Criminology, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Rebecca Searle is a historian whose work focuses on the ways in which the study of the past can be used to make critical interventions in the politics of the present. She established and co-ordinates the Housing Forum, an initiative to bring together academics, community organisations and policy makers to develop local solutions to the housing crisis. Her research interests include the history of the housing crisis; the global history of contemporary capitalism; the history of twentieth century Britain; and war and conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the Course leader for BA (Hons) War, Conflict and Modernity degree within the Humanities programme.

Zöe Sutherland’s main research is on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary artistic practice, focusing on the complex ‘global’ character of this period. Zöe's specialism is in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s-70s, often taken to be the index of art’s ‘globalisation’. By situating Conceptual Art within a more general and heterogenous ‘conceptualist’ tendency inherent to postwar artistic practice in many parts of the world, Zöe’s work attempts to trace the varying manifestations—and resistances—to the conceptual form that emerged through the radical politics and aesthetics of different regions.

Zöe also writes about feminist theory and politics, focusing on issues of gender, social reproduction, reproductive labour and reproductive technologies. Her emerging research interests are around the intersection of gender, race, class and old age, analysing the set of complex and varied trajectories—relation to work, reproductive labour, the family, state benefits—that impact upon socio-economic positions in later life. She is especially interested in how the triple problem of the financial crisis, the housing crisis and the issue of an ageing population will impact economically, psychologically and emotionally in the near future, and what kind of radical alternatives to housing for the elderly might be possible.

Zöe's broader research interests include continental philosophy, critical theory, the global history of contemporary capitalism and historical forms of radical and revolutionary politics. She is the Module co-ordinator for ‘The History of Sex and Gender’ on the BA (Hons) Critical Histories degree within the Humanities programme.

Her research interests broadly encompass 'public control over the wider determinants of health'. This includes 'access to information' and UK public health policy implemented in settings such as workplaces and local government.

Her interests are influenced by World Health Organization strategy, e.g. the Ottawa Charter (1986) and the Helsinki Statement (2014: 2-3,9). The latter document calls for safeguards to protect policies from distortion by commercial and vested interests; transparent policy making and access to information; participation of wider society in the development and implementation of government policy; and environmental sustainability. 

She is currently researching public views on privatisation, public health leadership and local councils' policy and visibility.

Clare Woodford is Principal Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)  School of Humanities, University of Brighton; director of the CAPPE Critical Theory research group strand; degree leader for BA (Hons) Philosophy, Politics and Ethics; and co-editor of Rowman and Littlefield’s Polemics series. She is the author of articles and chapters on democratic disorientation and ambivalence, the work of Rancière, Butler, Cavell, Honig, Rawls, Laclau and Foucault with respect to performance, extremism, transnational populism, democratic activism and the ethics of friendship. Her first book Disorienting democracy: politics of emancipation (London; Routledge) juxtaposed Rancière’s thought with that of Butler, Cavell, Menke and Derrida to draw out the practical implications of his writing for emancipatory politics. She is currently working on a project on love and desire in democratic theories of the subject. Clare works at the interstices of political philosophy, poststructuralism and democratic theory. Questioning the division between theory and practice, passivity and action, she rethinks ethics, education, literature and aesthetics for a powerful conceptualization of democracy as ongoing egalitarian emancipatory struggle.

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concern about the relationship between inequality and violence and unrest and how this plays out in advanced capitalist democracy. In a more general sense she is fascinated by concepts of social order and disorder; finitude and the edges of being and knowledge; the inter-play of faith, reason, belief and action; performance and politics and the varied ways in which social animals communicate with one another and both make themselves (or fail to make themselves) understood and how we seek (or fail to seek) to understand others.

Clare is available to supervise PhDs in any of the above areas. Please email enquiries to c.woodford@brighton.ac.uk.

Current PhD funding opportunities:

https://www.southcoastdtp.ac.uk/apply/

http://www.techne.ac.uk/

My research interests are broadly speaking related to logistics, digital epistemologies and surveillance, contemporary operations of power, post- and decolonial theory, and epistemic and structural violence.

My project is about citizenship and speculative narratives. I study how subjects are produced, interpellated, and propagated by narratives, including fictional and non-fictional texts, a threshold that I call into question. I see citizenship as an apparatus for the production and regulation of proprietary subjects, and I consider the complicities and refusals of this in speculative texts. To do this, I draw on deconstruction, queer theory, black studies, trans* theory, and post-Marxism.

My PhD research looks at the queer affects, practices and relations found in rural areas, and is based in both the School of Humanities and the School of Environment and Technology at the University of Brighton.

Academic understandings of sexuality often privilege urban centres as places where queer sex flourishes, which builds the assumption that sex must be visible and performed in order to be understood. My research challenges this metronormative link between ‘urbanity’ and ‘sex’. Instead, I explore ‘grey’, less-visible areas between sexual and non-sexual, somewhere and nowhere, and assert the queerness of non-metropolitan, ‘green’ areas.

My research interests can be categorised into 3 areas, all of which I approach using queer theory:

Asexualities and Nonsexualities

What can asexual people, communities and experiences teach us about sex, sexuality, desire and gender? Asexual people do not experience sexual attraction to others. Their livelihoods, perspectives and politics can therefore help us to critique systems of social and sexual control, like compulsory heterosexuality for example. I am interested in exploring the relations that people who do not experience sexual attraction have to 'sex' as a social function of power.

I'm also interested in understanding 'nonsexual' ways of being, and uncovering their radical politics. Unlike asexuality, all people engage with nonsexual ways of relating and feeling. What happens when we understand friendship, romance or even loneliness as nonsexualities?

Rural Queer Studies

The countryside is often seen as a place that lacks queerness, or at least opportunities through which to live queerly. Even so, many queer people continue to live in rural areas. In fact, non-metropolitan space plays host to some very deviant and dissident sexualities and experiences, whose queerness remains underappreciated.

I'm currently researching how one can respond to this tendency, and am doing so by studying queer relations, affects and identities in one rural area in SW England. I question the dominance of 'lack' and 'absence' in defining rural queer space, and am working towards new ways on conceptualising 'rural queer'.

Feminist, Queer, Spatial and Critical Theory

My interest in theory is wide-ranging but is most powerfully informed by queer theory. My research attempts to queer concepts and learn from the margins, but it is also informed by intersectional and abolitionist feminist thinking, as well as poststructural and postmodern understandings of space, place and philosophy. As such my research has previously engaged with: Butler, Foucault, Haraway, Massey, Halperin, Sedgwick, Halberstam, Ahmed, Lorde, Deleuze and Guattari.

Self-nelgect is a health and social care condition involving individuals, usually older adults, who, in some way, take insufficient care of themselves to an extent that is detrimental to their health. This condition takes a variety of forms including a lack of personal hygiene, poor nutrition and unmaintained home environments. Self-neglect is addressed under the Care Act 2014 within Safeguarding Adults through the application of specific sets of procedures which usually prioritise Mental Capacity Assessments. In practice, however, this condition presents a complexity of ethical dilemmas and challenegs which, whilst not unique within health and social care, come together in specific ways for self-neglect.

This thesis suggests that the problematic nature of self-neglect emerges from the legal, medical and conceptual framing employed. Despite their being underpinned by Human Rights concerns these frames lead to ageist, unjust and depersonalising practices based on pre-conceived moral assumptions and are detrimental to the individuals involved whose views are silenced.

This study constructs a thicker frame for self-neglect by starting with the views and understandings of individuals who self-neglect. It argues that both self-care and a lack of self-care are habitual activities that can change over time in response to physical and social experiences and as a consequence of decisions made, for some reasons, about other things. In this context the condition self-neglect becomes less about the individual's lack of capacity and capability to self-care, or stop self-neglecting. It becomes more about embodied beings constructed by their self-care and lack of self-care experiences who are positively coping with living a life. As such it offers the opportunity to identify different, less problematic approaches to self-neglect practice and intervention by health and social care practitioners 

My research takes a queer theoretical approach to comparing how sexuality is narrativised by Woolf in her fictive and non-fictive writings and comparing this with narrativisations in films based upon her life and work.

Thecore  purpose of my research is to denaturalise representations of and narratives around sexuality and comment on the potential for queer storytelling of different forms of media. I see the audience for my research as including scholars of Virginia Woolf, queer theory, and adaptation studies, artists working in the fields of literature and film and queer activists.

 I adopt an interdisciplinary frame, working at the intersection of literature and film studies and queer theory. My primary interest within literature is queer early Twentieth century literature (especially Woolf and Proust). Within queer theory my interests coalesce primarily around thinkers of temporality such as Butler, Dinshaw, Freeman and Stockton. My work is methodologically informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, Multi-Modal Disocurse Analysis and Queer Lingusitcs. My thinking is also informed more generally by late 19th and 20th century French philosophy (especially Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson but also Guattari, Bourdieu and Foucault), Feminist Thought (Rubin and Haraway) and New Materialism.

I am generally interested in the fields related to theories and politics of emancipatory transition production, particularly, in-between (post) marxism and (lacanian) psychoanalysis.

Working title

The Purloined Letters for Transitional Analysis: Towards a Theory and Politics of Emancipatory Production

Thesis works

This research explores, via the Lacaninan framework, the problems of theory, method and strategy that make the production of emancipatory transition and transformation possible and the ideological circle’s subsumption of this impossible. In the appendix of Reading Capital, Althusser suggests the problem of the theory of transition from one mode of social production to another as the most urgent problem in research in Marxism. This could sound like an outdated problem because it was posed so long ago, as it were, before the collapse of so-called real socialism and the Berlin Wall crashed down with brick dust. And yet, I think which is rather why this problem would be crucially one of the inevitable and urgent problems in emancipatory politics; there is a need for the consideration of why this question was raised. This is because, without the theory and question of emancipatory transition production, the practical-critical activities would risk and be still embedded in the reproduction of the existing dominant social structure by the ideological circle’s subsumption. In this case, “it has made of the proletariat not the gravedigger, but the savior of capitalism” (Castoriadis). For this reason, how and why it is possible to produce emancipatory transition and transformation without being limited to the ideological mise-en-abîme structure’s subsumption could still be a horizon which constitutes contemporary tasks of emancipatory politics.

In this thesis, these problems are unfolded across four areas split as two fields: the theoretical formation (e.g. the question of ‘theoretical’ ‘mode of production’), the social formation, the subject formation and the political formation. And, two fields are, as it were, the emancipatory theory of history of social formation and that of history of theoretical formation entangled within the former problem. This process aims to unwittingly reconstitute Althusser’s renewal of Marxism via ‘symptomatic reading’, examining the theoretical practices of post/marxists and deconstructive inheritances. I hope this textual work could, perhaps, make the puppet’s hands move together and re-write certain letters: the purloined letters for transitional analysis and emancipatory production.