Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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A new academic and intellectual bio after an eventful year

I’m an interdisciplinary academic at the University of Manchester, where I’m Associate Dean for Digital Education in the Faculty of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Education.

There are three strands to my research. The first develops conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of Large Language Models in social life. The second treats higher education as the critical site where their social and cultural dynamics are being worked out in practice, which are encountered through problems that are institutional, cultural and pedagogical as much as they are technical. The Associate Dean role is intimately connected with this second strand, in that my thinking about assessment, integration and institutional strategy is continually tested against the practical work of real world implementation. The third is psychodynamic, asking what it is that people are doing when they turn to these systems.

Originally trained as a philosopher and sociologist, my work draws on philosophical anthropology, digital sociology, platform studies and psychoanalysis. I’m (slowly) training as a group analyst and I eventually want to do clinical work on reliance, dependence and addiction in relation to everyday use of social platforms and LLMs, particularly amongst young men. My long term theoretical project is to incorporate Lacanian and Bollasian psychoanalysis into Archerian realism.

I’ve written or edited twelve books. The Platform Learns to Speak (with Milan Sturmer) and The AI Crisis in Higher Education are forthcoming. Recent books include Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are (Routledge, 2025), Generative AI for Academics (Sage, 2024) and Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2019), and I co-edited Building the Post-Pandemic University (Edward Elgar, 2023). I love writing books and it’s the main reason I became an academic.

I serve on the editorial boards of Civic Sociology, the Journal of Digital Social Research and Globalisation, Societies and Education. As joint coordinator of the Critical Realism Network, council member of the International Association for Critical Realism and trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism, I work to support the diffusion and integrity of critical realist scholarship. I’m the literary executor for Margaret Archer, and I work to promote engagement with her morphogenetic approach, particularly amongst early career researchers.