I'm a London-based cultural and media theorist, whose research spans digital studies, contemporary art and visual culture, environmental humanities, and critical theory. I am currently Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities at King's College London. In my research, I seek inventive frameworks for understanding how new forms of digital and corporate power are altering the conditions for radical leftist opposition and critique. My work tracks how the tactics employed by artists and activists working in experimental or marginal traditions are evolving in response to these challenges. My first book, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke University Press, 2020), explores what artistic resistance looks like when disruption and dissent can be easily co-opted and commodified. A second experimental book, Safety Orange (U Minnesota Press, Forerunners series, 2021), uses the bureaucratic color standard “Safety Orange” as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and attention in a 21st-century American landscape of mass privatization, securitization, and incarceration. In my current book, Yes Machine: Relentless Positivity at the End of the World, I argue that the possibility to say no—to resist, dissent, and negate—is steadily being designed out of our everyday devices and infrastructures. As the techno-optimistic juggernaut of capitalist growth unleashed by Silicon Valley ideology and neoliberal policy is reaching its nightmarish apex, effecting widespread environmental and social breakdown, our capacity to resist has never been more vital, and never been more endangered. My essays have appeared in such venues as Journal of Visual Culture, Social Text, Discourse, WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), MIRAJ, and TDR/The Drama Review. I am the co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of the 2nd edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015). I am a founding member of the digital research collective Precarity Lab; the collective's manifesto, Technoprecarious, was published by Goldsmiths/MIT Press in 2020. In 2021, I co-founded the Critical Futures Project, a research collective that explores theoretical approaches for addressing the new urgency of climate change under digital and racial capitalism. Before coming to King's, I was Associate Professor of American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan and, prior to that, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. I hold a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. |