About

I research destruction, archival imperfection, material volatility, resistance and ambiguity in digital and visual cultures, identity and media. I completed my PhD with the London Graduate School at Kingston University, London in 2014, and my other qualifications at the University of Melbourne.

My first book, The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy of Expenditure After Georges Bataille was published in 2022 by Amsterdam University Press, and is available here. In it, I take destruction as the founding operation of culture and trace it through philosophy, the media of September 11 and disaster films, end-of-the-world narratives, execution and eroticism, before addressing the effects of the displacement of linear destruction on the culture and media produced in digital systems. In other words, it’s got sex, death, explosions… and computers. And an unexpected amount of Walter Benjamin for some reason. And a joke that will only be funny to people who are intimately familiar with Australian slang and Georges Bataille. I hope both of those people enjoy it. 

My current research investigates how colonial logics continue to inform everyday digital cultures and practices, and the rigid boundaries of social and individual identity these produce. I seek to uncover the implications these practices have, as well as the cracks where resistance is possible, to encounter contradiction, disruption and the liminal.

In October 2022, Dr. Eloise Faichney and I launched a new project examining the re-emergence of queer spaces in post-lockdown Melbourne. We’re considering how those spaces have changed, moved and evolved, as well as the dynamics between physical and digital queer communities.