Current projects
Media gifts
My current research-in-progress consists of a series of performative media projects or ‘media gifts’. These projects are gifts in the sense they operate as part of what has come to be known as the ‘academic gift economy’ whereby research is circulated for free rather than as intellectual property or market commodities that are bought and sold. They are performative in that they do not endeavour to provide a representation of the world so much as to act in the world. In other words, they are instances of media that endevour to produce the effects they name or things of which they speak, and which are engaged primarily through their enactment and performance. They are a way to practice an affirmative media theory or media philosophy, where analysis and critique are not abandoned but perhaps take more affirmative, creative, inventive forms. Operating at the intersections of art, media and philosophy, the different gifts in the series each in their own way experiment with the potential new media technologies hold for making affective, singular, ethical and political interventions in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. They include:
• The open access archive CSeARCH (Cultural Studies e-Archive)
• The Open Humanites Press Culture Machine Liquid Books series – a series, edited by Clare Birchall and myself, of digital ‘books’ readers are able to remix, reformat, reversion, reuse, reinvent and republish.
• New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader – a ‘liquid book’ edited by myself and Clare Birchall as a follow-up to our 2006 woodware volume, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory
• Liquid Theory TV (with Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge) – a series of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) programmes experimenting with new and different ways of acting as a ‘public intellectual’ in the current media environment by communicating academic research and ideas to a wider community both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the university.
• ‘WikiNation’ – a project exploring new ways of organising institutions, cultures, communities and countries, ways which do not uncritically repeat the reductive adherence to democracy, hegemony and Western, bourgeois, liberal humanism that can be found in the institution of academic criticism more widely.
• ‘The University 3G’ – a proposal, in the form of a mission statement, for a new idea of the university: one which neither goes along with the forces of capitalist neoliberal economics which are increasingly turning higher education into an extension of business; nor advocates a return to the kind of paternalistic and class-bound ideas that previously dominated the university, and which view it in terms of an elite cultural training and the reproduction of a national culture.
• ‘Pirate Philosophy’ – a project investigating some of the implications of so-called internet piracy for the humanities, particularly the latter’s ideas of authorship, the book, the academic journal, scholarly writing and publishing, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use, content creation and cultural production. ‘Pirate Philosophy’ explores such ideas both philosophically and legally through the creation of an actual ‘pirate’ text using peer-to-peer BitTorrent networks.