Generally, my research asks the question: Can transforming the self transform the world? I answer yes, but only if we think of self-transformation – or ‘askesis’ – as something more than an isolated, individual project whose political import, if it has one, starts and ends with the hope that many individual self-transformations will amount to a broader world-transformation.
I aim to develop a sufficiently nuanced theory of what self-transformation has and could entail in its political valences. Properly understood, effective asceticism is always a collective undertaking in constant dialectical relation with broad economic and political structures and local, concrete institutions.
Book (in progress): The City and Self Transformation: Michel Foucault and the Death of Politics
Dissertation: Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism. Link
List of Publications
“The Aristotelean Ethic and the Spirit of Neoliberalism: Askesis and Capitalism Today,” in Revisiting Classical Antiquity and its Reception, ed. Burkhard Fehr and Panagiotis Roilos, Brill, September 2024. (Forthcoming).
“Between Authority and Care: Plato’s Crito as Defense of the Philosophical Life.” Dionysius, April 2024. (Forthcoming).
“Simone Weil’s ‘Rationalisation’: Translated from French & Annotated,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1)(January 2024), 64-74. Link
“Human Being, Working Body, Working Day,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1)(January 2024), 58-63. Link
“On the Ownership of the Means of Training: Domination, Asceticism, and Capacities of Resistance.” Theory & Event, 26(4) (October 2023), 701-726. Link
“(Review of) Mark Coeckelbergh, Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Journal of Foucault Studies, No. 34(2023): 52-56. Link
“(Review of) Niki Kasumi Clements, Sites of the Ascetic Self: John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation.” Journal of Foucault Studies, No. 32 (2022): 388-391. Link
“Graffiti Walls: Arts-Based Mental Health Knowledge Translation with Young People in Secondary Schools,” in Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Ed. Deborah Lupton and Deana Leahy. London: Routledge, 2021. (With Katherine Boydell et al.). Link
In addition to the above listed works, I am currently at work on an essay exploring asceticism as an anti-colonial practice of liberation, co-authored with Dimitri M’Bama. I have also recently completed essays on Foucault and Arendt, on poverty in Classical Athens, and have begun research for a second book project that is tentatively entitled: Social Domination and Political Asceticism: History, Theory, Strategy.