Graduate Directory

Summary of Expertise

Communication Studies, Fascism Studies, Political Theory, Cultural Studies (Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools)

Research Interests

Political Theory, Communication Studies, Fascism Studies, Modernism, Cultural Studies (Birmingham School), Political Economy, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Performance Studies and Phenomenology, Affect and the History of Emotions, Karl Marx, Eastern Marxism, Walter Benjamin, Evald Ilyenkov, Karel Kosík, Sara Ahmed, Pierre Bourdieu, Ernst Bloch, Stuart Hall, Temporality, Conjunctural Methodology, Religion Studies, the History of Capitalism, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Escapism, Libertarianism, Postmodernism

Biography, Education and Training

I’m trained in communication and cultural studies in the Birmingham School tradition. Methodologically, I’m committed to what Lawrence Grossberg calls “conjunctural analysis.”

I study the relationship between capitalism and fascism—especially how, in moments of crisis, aesthetic and cultural practices are reconfigured to manage capitalism’s contradictions and block the formation of leftist politics, often by intensifying what Debord calls “the spectacle.”

I focus on how people make sense of the world—including through what Ernst Cassirer calls “myth”—and how this sense-making intersects with daily life and practical activity. This relationship between aesthetic forms and everyday practices, which Raymond Williams calls “culture,” becomes politically decisive when crisis forces capital to reorganize people’s perceptions and feelings to preserve capitalism. At the center of this process is abstraction. In the Grundrisse, Marx associates abstraction with disarticulation, division, simplification, and the reduction of social complexity into seemingly autonomous forms. Capitalism presents abstract, fetishized forms—like value, money, and the commodity—as if they were concrete, stable realities. These abstractions mediate perception while concealing their origins in social labor. In moments of crisis, this inversion becomes politically volatile. That’s why, as Benjamin put it, fascism “aestheticizes politics”: it intensifies abstraction to displace class antagonism and reorient perception around mythical unities, enemies, and identities.

To clarify these dynamics, I apply insights from Eastern Marxists like Evald Ilyenkov, Valentin Vološinov, Karel Kosík, and Lev Vygotsky, who developed dialectical approaches to the relationships between consciousness, material conditions, and social life. By Kosík’s critique of abstract totality (particularly exemplified in Hegel), reification leads to an abstract, rigid schema that divides the world into a dualism: that which conforms to an idealized, linearly progressive rational order and that which appears as irrational excess. This suppression of mediation leads to theoretical and practical social and political deadlocks. In Marxist debates, it often results in economistic or mechanistic explanations that fail to account for the role of culture and perception in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This failure to be sufficiently dialectical makes it harder to grasp how fascism functions not as a mere reaction, but as a reorganizing force that draws on cultural forms to stabilize capitalist rule in periods of breakdown.

It’s capitalist abstraction—in its function of circumventing contradictions and social antagonisms—not merely political or aesthetic form—that mediates between liberalism and fascism. Crises of capitalism don’t simply interrupt liberal society; they expose the abstractions that already govern it, often intensifying the demand for authoritarian resolution. This helps explain why both liberal and Marxist theories of fascism often fall short.

In liberal accounts, fascism is typically treated as a deviation or external threat. These frameworks abstract by fetishizing surface effects, mistaking them for causes, and obscure the question of how liberal institutions themselves help generate fascist tendencies—especially under conditions of economic, political, social, and ideological breakdown (a polycrisis). Meanwhile, many Marxist approaches treat the superstructure as transparently and unilaterally (expressively) determined by the base, underestimating the mediating role of ideological state apparatuses—especially the media system—in restructuring perception and organizing affect.

This oversight is particularly evident in the neglect of Alfred Hugenberg, the German media mogul whose consolidation of press and film played a decisive role in shaping the conditions for fascist ascendancy. The transformation of right-wing Weimar media under Hugenberg aligns with many of the cultural features we now associate with fascism—from the heroic image of the leader to the staging of national unity through spectacle. Yet despite his instrumental role, Hugenberg ultimately came to regret facilitating the full expression of Hitlerian Nazism, illustrating how the production of fascist culture can exceed intention and become a structural function of capital’s crisis management.

I often think critically with and against Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, modern forms of escapism, libertarianism, individualism, and postmodernism.

Apart from this scholarly work, I'm also a filmmaker, musician, and creative writer. I'm very interested in thinking about how to make art that—not only avoids reproducing problematic ideological functions, but—contributes to the imagination of better futures.

One great source of inspiration for me comes from the Zapatista saying Caminamos al paso del mas lento [We walk at the pace of the slowest], and I aspire to contributing to political projects (including aesthetic ones) founded on the idea of privileging the most disadvantaged. If such political projects take for granted that everyone is necessarily vulnerable and in need of care, then it occurs to me that fascists might reject such a conceit. Instead, the fascist subject (tragically) hopes to overcome any and all forms of vulnerability.

I have a very sweet, interesting, fun, curious daughter, named Jovie.

Honors, Awards and Grants

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

Selected Publications

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

Selected Presentations

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 “The Fascist Social System-as-The Intensification of Liberal Culture’s Fascist Aspects,” at Countering the plague: forces of reaction and war and how to fight them, Historical Materialism London (declined invitation)

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

Teaching Interests

I'm particularly interested in teaching about politics, writing, aesthetics, film studies, communication, performance studies, social theory, vulnerability, and emotions.