News
March 2024: My article "Political fatalism and the (im)possibility of social transformation" has just been published in Contemporary Political Theory. I develop an in-depth analysis of political fatalism understood as the belief that major social change is impossible or inevitable. I then offer some potential solutions to it: historically sensitive critique, political imagination, and a combination of bounded spontaneism and long-term political organisation. The article is open-access so can be downloaded and read for free here.
January 2024: I will be presenting at BISA (British International Studies Association) Annual Conference in Birmingham in June on 'Real talk or empty words? On the limits of Denmarkâs global climate leadership ambitionsâ as part of the panel 'The politics of actually existing climate leadershipâ. Iâll also be a discussant on the panel 'The political economy of green energy transitions in an age of crisesâ.
December 2023: Together with co-editors Catherine Duxbury and Dave Ashby, Iâve just signed a book contract with Routledge for an edited collection provisionally titled "Interdisciplinary Pedagogy in Universities: From Theory to Practice" to be published in the Routledge Advances in Sociology series in 2024. In the book we explore the crucial role of interdisciplinarity in addressing the most pressing socio-political questions of our time.
My contribution deals with the challenge of teaching about the climate crisis from within the climate crisis, and what kind of emancipatory education is possible (or not) in such a situation by comparing Humboldtian, neoliberal, and critical theory approaches to climate education.
August 2023: I have a new article out in the Sociological Review Magazine, co-authored with Marion Lieutaud. It's on the relationship between casualisation, care, and strikes, and how universities make it impossible to develop proper practices of care toward each other. You can read it here.
June 2023: I wrote an article for Jacobin on Denmark's recent purchase of weapons from Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, you can read it here.
May 2023: The video recording for the author-meets-critics event with Søren Mau that I organised at LSE is now up:
April 2023: I have accepted a 4-year Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at the University of Sussex on the UK Research and Innovation-funded project "SUS POL: Supply-side policies for fossil fuels". I will focus on the political dynamics of cutting fossil fuel extraction and expansion, explaining how and why countries can move beyond fossil fuels.
The project is led by Professor Peter Newell, one of Britain's leading figures in the politics and political economy of climate change.
April 2023: I appeared live on Danish TV station TV2 News to discuss recent protests by Extinction Rebellion in London and Letzte Generation in Berlin (the segment is paywalled):
March 2023: In May, I will present my paper Ecological emancipation and class relations in the Capitalocene at the Critical Emancipations International Conference at KU Leuven, Belgium.
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 'âBlack Intellectuals in the Age of Crackâ: 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.
Itâs 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 Riversâ overlooked essay offers crucial resources for theorising the role and responsibility of intellectuals on 3 key points: 1. bridging the disconnect between ivoryâtower 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 rearâguard 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 Deanâs 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 Marcuseâs 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.