About

I’m a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at the University of Brighton, and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. Since completing my PhD in 2022, I have been preparing my thesis, “Dispossessive Citizenship: Property and Personhood in Speculative Narrative,” for publication as a monograph, and developing ideas for a postdoc project.

My research seeks to desediment the thresholds of fiction and reality, the maintenance of which, I argue, forms an epistemic condition for the colonisation of subjectivity. Following the trajectories of Sylvia Wynter and Jacques Derrida, among others, I examine the ways that philosophical, literary, and constitutional discourses have sought to control the fictionality of narrative, thereby to define the parameters of truth and possibility, and to set the boundaries of the human. In their attempts to reify the fiction/reality binary, which I call the “epistemic threshold,” these narrative traditions have generated the racialised, gendered, heteronormative, and neuronormative ontologies that activists and critics now work to denaturalise and displace. I aim to contribute to this effort by showing that the epistemic threshold is an unmasterably unstable and speculatively overdetermined site that can only support contingent foundations (of the kind theorised by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe), not the transcendental ground required for the putatively timeless and universal ontologies of liberal humanism.