Short Biography

Postgraduate

Postgraduate work at Warwick, following a first degree in philosophy and sociology at Warwick, saw me study with Gillian Rose, whose work on Adorno and Hegel did more than anything else to change my understanding of philosophy. My PhD, supervised by the Hegel scholar Stephen Houlgate, was an attempt to understand the relationship between the philosophical approaches of Hegel on the one hand and Gilles Deleuze on the other. Never having been convinced that the standard accounts of this relationship were correct, I wanted to take a historical approach to it using the role played by German Idealism in 20th century French philosophy as a guide, with particular attention being paid to how Fichte and Schelling, as well as Hegel, had been understood by figures like Jean Wahl, Kojeve and Hyppolite.

My conviction was that the crisis of philosophical reason precipitated by Kant's philosophy, and the reaction to it of his contemporaries like Herder, Schulz and Jacobi, had created a constellation of philosophical problems which, clarified through German Idealism, continued to reverberate throughout 20th century thought. Having read Manfred Frank, Peter Dews and Andrew Bowie, Schelling's importance was particularly marked for me, given his insistence on the inescapability of an "opaque ground" for thought, an unsettling residue left behind by the final throes of the Enlightenment.

Research

The major consequence of this work was that temporality and its relation to thought became more central for me. I drew on insights from the doctoral work whilst working with Barbara Adam on her professorial fellowship, In Pursuit of the Future (IPoF), which sought to analyse key aspects of how societies construct and manage their relationships with their own futures.

This work was formative for the three themes which continue to inform my work - understanding the social construction of the future; attachment, stability and uncertainty; and uncertainty, risk and technology. These themes hopefully unite my interests in sociology and philosophy in continuing to develop an original social theory and ethics of (and for) the future.

Following the end of IPoF, I worked on a six-month BBC-Trust funded project in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, which examined the way devolution in the UK is represented in the national media (see report here, and a little media coverage). Since the end of that work, I have been pursuing research on the ethics and regulation of nanotechnology, together with work on experiences of uncertainty connected to major energy and transport infrastructure projects (including some independent consultancy work), and their effect on individuals and communities.

I'm also responsible for setting up and (for the most part) running Cardiff Philosophy Cafe.