My research explores why we are failing to navigate emerging security crises and how conceptual engineering in political theory might help us adapt to such conditions more effectively. More generally, my interests include contemporary political theory; philosophical anthropology; political geography and military psychogeography; intelligence history and security studies; the philosophy of technology (especially Gilbert Simondon); and film and literary criticism. In addition to my research program, I write sporadically on topics that interest me (conceptual engineering, risk, and weird media) at Gray Sky Thinking and direct Strangeways Idea Lab, an independent research and working group focused on exploring strange new ways of thinking about technics and technology.
My first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is available now from Bloomsbury Publishing (recently reviewed in Theory & Event 29:1).
My second book, Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside, is forthcoming from Routledge. The book characterizes outer space as a fundamentally political and territorial domain and develops a philosophical anthropology adequate to Space Age conditions. Its central claim is that our political, spatial, and strategic imagination is underwritten by categories of the exogenous – or what is considered to be “outside” the scope of the traditionally political – and that the opening of space as an economic and military frontier forces these categories into view. The argument moves through the politics of the space community and the United States Space Force, the future of territory and war, the conceptual history of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and political theory at a planetary scale. Related material will appear soon as a chapter in an edited volume from Stanford University Press, and complementary work has appeared in Vault of Culture and Limina.
I am working on my next book, tentatively titled The Esoteric State: Military-Industrial Imaginaries and the Politics of Secret Worldbuilding. The book will examine some of the strangest and most disavowed undertakings of the national security state – e.g., psychic research, human experimentation, psychological warfare, and related projects – as privileged sites for understanding how modern power operates. Rather than treating these projects as marginal curiosities, it reads them as revealing exceptions through which the deeper logics and norms of state power come into question. At stake is an account of the modern state as one that actively shapes the conditions under which reality can be governed, navigated, and perceived. In aid of this, the book engages at length with Jean Baudrillard, a highly relevant yet largely misunderstood theorist of media, politics, and secrecy whose work remains uncannily suited for maneuvering through our contemporary predicament, in which power increasingly operates by destabilizing reality itself.