Humanities Division
Graduate Student
Graduate
Humanities & Social Sciences Building
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/9767447036?pwd=enZWZ0pQRVNLNHJwMStjRE9SZURNQT09
History Of Consciousness
I’m a scholar of communication and cultural studies whose work draws on political theory and philosophy to examine the relationship between capitalism, knowledge, and media.
My research develops along two intersecting streams. In the first, I investigate fascism as a modern form of abstraction. I study how the wage-form generates two tendencies within capitalism—liberal and fascist—each organized by distinct ways of spectacularizing social life. Liberal spectacularization fragments social relations through market and media abstraction, while fascist spectacularization aims to reunify them through mythic and violent identification. These tendencies interpenetrate most visibly in what I call "exceptional media"—state-aligned communication systems that circulate bigoted, paranoid, and militarist narratives. Such media reproduce capitalist hierarchies, surplus populations, and scapegoats while concealing their anti-democratic purposes beneath the appearance of free markets and open public discourse.
The second stream of my work focuses on knowledge practices and the political economy of contemporary science. I’m involved in two collaborative research groups: one examining the sociology of science—how scientists and institutions are shaped by, and can intervene in, capitalist society—and another studying how knowledge is produced, taught, and shared in alternative economic projects. In this work, we ask how such projects generate their own institutions and how communication across them, and with other social actors, might help transform the conditions under which they operate.
I have a very sweet, interesting, fun, curious daughter, named Jovie.
Communication Studies, Fascism Studies, Cultural Studies (Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools)
Political Theory, Communication Studies, Fascism Studies, Cultural Studies (Birmingham School), Political Economy, Dialectical Materialism, Marxist Phenomenology, Marxist Science Studies, Karl Marx, Eastern Marxism, Walter Benjamin, Evald Ilyenkov, Karel Kosík, Guy Debord, Stuart Hall, Temporality, Conjunctural Methodology, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger
I'm particularly interested in teaching about politics, writing, aesthetics, film studies, communication, performance studies, social theory, the philosophy of science, phenomenology, and emotions/affect.
2024 Tribeca and History of Consciousness Summer Research and Travel Grant
2023-2024 UCHRI Grant for The California Ideology Working Group
2023 Affiliated PhD Student at American University of Beirut
2023 Summer STARS Re-entry Scholarship
2023 History of Consciousness Travel Funding
2022-2023 UCHRI Grant for Alt-Right Media Literacy Series
2022 History of Consciousness Travel Funding
2022 Summer STARS Re-entry Scholarship
2022 Summer Graduate Dean’s Travel Grant
2022 History of Consciousness Summer Research Support
2021-2022 Regents Fellowship
2025 “Fascism-as-Insurance: On the Temporality of Contemporary Reactionary Politics,” at Risk, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
2025 “Fascist Epistemology: Abstract Materialities and Myths,” at Combating the Catastrophe, Historical Materialism Paris
2025 “Life, Death, and the Mythological Machine,” at Life and Death, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy Graduate Conference (Kingston University, London)
2025 “Crisis, Preventive Counterrevolution, and Capitalist Media,” at Organizing in the Capitalocene, Historical Materialism Athens
2025 “Forget Critical Theory: A Critique of Modern Witnessing,” at Media Fields: Witnessing, UCSB
2024 “Capitalism and The Phenomenon of Mass Fear,” at Polycrisis across Divides, Historical Materialism Cluj-Napoca
2024 “Immediate Transcendence and Purifying Violence: On Surfer Fascism,” at California Ideology, UCSC
2024 “Fragmentation and Intensification: On the Liberal Dissolution of Authority and The Fascist Tragedy of Authority’s Simulacrum,” Authority and Its Discontents, Fides Quaerens at Villanova University
2023 “Fragmentation and Intensification: On the Capitalist Production of Fascist Culture” at Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts, American University of Beirut
2023 “Modern Dialectical Intensification and The Capitalist Production of Far-Right Habitus” at Spatialities of the Right: Practices and Tactics of the Far-Right, American Association of Geographers Conference
2022 “Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation” at Culture and Theory in Reactionary Times, University of Minnesota
2022 “Fragmentation, Fascism, and the Grendel Academy” at The Spectre Haunting Academia: Understanding the Role of Academia in the Rise of the Far-Right, University of Heidelberg
2024 “Imane Khelif, Immediate Transcendence, and Fascism,” in Blue Labyrinths (https://bluelabyrinths.com/2024/09/10/imane-khelif-immediate-transcendence-and-fascism/)
2022 “The Conformist: Liberal Habitus in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” in Judas, As botas de, (https://revista.judasasbotasde.com.br/332022/the-conformist-liberal-habitus-in-hegels-phenomenology-of-spirit/), Brasil