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 entailed 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/strategies and local, concrete institutions.
The title that I give to my general research agenda is “global political asceticisms.” I undertake the global, contextual, and comparative study of organized systems for the training and modification of bodily and mental capacities. Most recently, I have been exploring Gandhi’s ascetic activism and the ashram as an “ascetic technology” for the generation of anticolonial and anticapitalist political agency.
Publications
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 (Available here)
Peer reviewed publications
“Practice or Product? Labour, Training, and the Ethics of AI.” Global Labour Journal, 16(2) (May 2025), 125-140.
“Training the Philosopher King: Ancient Models of Political Action in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault.” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 18(3) (November 2024), 365-391.
“The Aristotelean Ethic and the Spirit of Neoliberalism: Askesis and Capitalism Today,” in Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual. Ed. Burkhard Fehr and Panagiotis Roilos (Leiden/Boston: Brill, August 2024), 430-456.
“Between Authority and Care: Plato’s Crito as Defense of the Philosophical Life.” Dionysius, 39 (July 2024), 97-129.
“On the Ownership of the Means of Training: Domination, Asceticism, and Capacities of Resistance.” Theory & Event, 26(4) (October 2023), 701-726.
“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.).
Essays and translations
“Simone Weil’s ‘Rationalisation’: Translated from French & Annotated,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1) (January 2024), 64-74.
“Human Being, Working Body, Working Day,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1) (January 2024), 58-63.
Book reviews
“(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.
“(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.
Please email me if you would like a PDF of any of the above for personal research use
Current projects
Articles under review
I currently have works under review on the following themes:
Anticolonial ethics of self-cultivation and asceticism as anticolonial practice in thinkers such as Gandhi and Frederick Douglass (co-authored with Dimitri M’Bama)
Inés Valdez’ work on racial capitalism, migration, and the failure of the left to meet the challenges of contemporary emancipatory democracy
A historical survey of the moralization of wealth and poverty in the ancient world
These works serve as first studies towards a second book project that is tentatively entitled: A Comparative History of Political Asceticisms.