News

March 2023: Dr Marion Lieutaud and I have been awarded an LSE Changemakers Grant to continue our projects focusing on working conditions, working life, and links to life outside of work... to document and monitor the experience of early-career and casualised workers at LSE.

March 2023: I was featured in the Washington Post's portrait series of life under the cost of living crisis:

February 2023: I have organised an author-meets-critics event on Søren Mau's book Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023) at LSE on 24 May 2023, with contributions from Sara Salem, Paul Apostolidis, and Sumi Madhok. You can register here for free.

December 2022: I appeared on David Palumbo-Liu's (Stanford) podcast Speaking Out of Place, discussing the recent wave of strike action in the UK, specifically focusing on the university strikes. You can listen by clicking here.

November 2022: I appeared on live Danish TV2 News to discuss the possibilities of a second Scottish independence referendum. You can watch the broadcast below:

September 2022: My article '“Black Intellectuals in the Age of Crack”: Organic Responsibility, the Race-Class-Gender Nexus, and Action Paralysis in the Boston Review Roundtables, 1992-1993' has been published open-access in Global Intellectual History. You can read and download it for free here.

It’s a deep-dive into two incredible events at Harvard and MIT involving bell hooks, Cornel West, Eugene Rivers, Glenn Loury, Margaret Burnham, and Henry Louis Gates and other key intellectuals. They sought to clarify how intellectuals, specifically Black intellectuals, can contribute to social struggles against racism and poverty. I chart 3 key themes: 1. intellectuals should be embedded and close to the social suffering they aim to address; 2. the importance of thinking race, class, and gender together; and 3. profound action paralysis that engenders despair about how far intellectuals can even contribute.

April 2022: My article "Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals" has been published open-access in Constellations. You can download it for free here.

I argue that Rivers’ overlooked essay offers crucial resources for theorising the role and responsibility of intellectuals on 3 key points: 1. bridging the disconnect between ivory‐tower intellectuals and social movements and struggles on the ground. 2. envisaging a role for the intellectual between vanguard activism and disinterested academia through a position akin to the rear‐guard intellectual. 3. a promising avenue to think about the difference between a responsibility for and a responsibility to among intellectuals.

August 2021: My article Comradely Critique has been published open-access in Political Studies. You can download it for free (here).

I explore what it means to disagree with people with whom you usually agree. How should political actors concerned with emancipation approach internal disagreement? In short, how should we go about critiquing not our enemies or adversaries but those with whom we share emancipatory visions? I outline the notion of comradely critique as a solution to these questions. I go through a series of examples of how and when critique should differ depending on its addressee, drawing on Jodi Dean’s figure of the comrade. I develop a contrast with its neighbours the ally and the partisan, thus identifying key elements of comradely critique: good faith, equal humanity, equal standing, solidarity, collaboration, common purpose and dispelling fatalism. I then analyse Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s private correspondence on the 1960s German student movement as an illustration of (imperfect) comradely critique. I conclude by identifying a crucial tension about publicness and privateness.

June 2021: I have accepted an offer as an LSE Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is a career development post for 2-3 years where I will teach the interdisciplinary, School-wide LSE100 as well as work on various parts of my research agenda.

June 2021: My article Faith between reason and affect: thinking with Antonio Gramsci has been published in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. It is published as open access, you can find it here.

I argue that faith is a crucial concept for understanding the relationship between reason and affect. By allowing people to learn from religious faith for secular ends, it can help generate political action for emancipatory change. Antonio Gramsci's underexplored secular-political and materialist conception of faith provides an important contribution to such a project. By speaking to common sense and tradition, faith avoids imposing a wholly external set of normative and political principles, instead taking people as they are as the starting point for generating emancipatory change. It also allows us to imagine the construction of alternative institutions (the Church provides an interesting model for challenging existing state authority). Theorists should therefore pay attention not just to the rationalist logic of discursive justification but also to the complex processes of social, collectively held emotions and how these influence political action as forms of affect. The article provides a detailed reconstruction of Gramsci's conception of faith and analyzes the instruments it provides for bridging the gap between reason and affect.