Graduate Directory

Key MacFarlane
  • Title
    • PhD Candidate
  • Division Humanities Division
  • Department
    • History of Consciousness Department
  • Email
  • Website
  • Office Location
    • Humanities & Social Sciences Building, Room 366
  • Mail Stop History Of Consciousness

Research Interests

Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Marx and Marxism, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Space and Time, History of 20th-C. Philosophy

Biography, Education and Training

My research focuses on the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and social practice, bridging the fields of phenomenology, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and human geography. My dissertation, Revolutionary Reduction, considers the historical and theoretical connections between Husserlian phenomenology and Marxism. I argue that the neglected tradition of Marxist phenomenology provides crucial critical resources for our moment of global crisis, particularly with regard to rethinking questions of self-consciousness, collective intentionality, and everyday life.

 

I am currently editing (with Margath Walker) a special issue in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space on the problem of space in the Frankfurt School.

 

Education:

M.A., Geography, University of Washington

B.A., Philosophy and English, Colgate University

Selected Publications

“Capital and Space,” in Audrey Kobayashi (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition. vol. 2, Elsevier, 2020, pp. 1–7.

 

“Time, Waste, and the City,” Antipode, vol. 51, no. 1, 2019, pp. 225–247.

 

“Hamburg’s Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence, and Memory in a Contemporary Global City” (with Katharyne Mitchell), International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 43, no. 5, 2019, pp. 816–832.

 

“A Thousand CEOs: Relational Thought, Processual Space, and Deleuzian Ontology in Human Geography and Strategic Management,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 299–320.

 

Public Writing:

“The Rat Maze: Capitalism and Consciousness,” Blue Labyrinths, November 10, 2020.

  

The Greenhouse Effect,” Mute Magazine, February 4, 2018.

Selected Presentations

"Subjectivity and Self-Estrangement: Enzo Paci on Marxism, Phenomenology, and the First Person," Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Cophenhagen, August 15, 2024.

 

“Residues of the Dialectic: Lefebvre on Sedimentation,” The American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Honolulu, April 20, 2024.

 

"Space and the Frankfurt School" (with Margath Walker), American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, Portland March 22, 2024.

 

“Marxism and Lived Experience,” Historical Materialism Conference, London, November 10, 2023.

 

“The Problem of Marxist Phenomenology,” Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research, Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject? Beirut, June 30, 2023.

 

“Critical Theory and the Problem of Orientation,” The American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Denver, April 25, 2023. 

 

“Techniques of Nearness: Benjamin and the Critique of Lived Space,” Departures and Arrivals: Space in the Frankfurt School Workshop, February 15, 2023.