Correspondences can be identified between (on the one hand) androcentric cosmogonies, ancestral misogyny and tribal blood rituals, and (on the other) the classical paradigm of vampirism, especially in its literary and on-screen flowering. Specifically, the initiatory culture-hero and the archetypal vampire both confer a haematologically-mediated…[Read more]

Citizenship and the posthuman have not been often theorized together. In this paper, I want to think about their coalition both as a new episode in the efforts of politics for citizenship, including knowledge politics, and as a source of rebalancing power against governmental and corporate interests in citizenship politics. Here, I seek to address…[Read more]

This paper presents some of the ideas central to my current developing research into the modes of historical television drama, particularly the Gothic mode. In focusing on the 2018 television adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the paper illustrates the idea of the Gothic mode in operation, considering its relationship to notions of historical…[Read more]

This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. Malabou effaces the unsettled debates within the life sciences in order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or…[Read more]

This paper examines the use of the Gothic mode in historical television drama to suggest it is used to emphasise engagement with historical traumas, and suggest that these traumas still have relevance today. This emphasis works by engaging with the associations that are acquired around the Gothic mode through experience, recognising the aesthetic…[Read more]

La théorie du chaos n’est pas aussi complexe qu’on le prétend souvent Comme l’observe Robert Juliano, le principe sous-jacent est que “dans le caractère aléatoire apparent des systèmes complexes chaotiques, il existe des modèles sous-jacents, des interconnexions, des boucles de rétroaction constantes, la répétition, l’auto-similarité , fractales…[Read more]

Chaos theory is not as complex as it si often made out to be As Robert Juliano observes, the underlying principle is that “within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.”

“Chaos has been for…[Read more]

In 1894, Lord Alfred Douglas referred to homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name”, a phrase that describes the unmentionable nature of homosexuality in a period of time when sodomy was illegal. Even in the 21st century, there continues to be something unspeakable and forbidden about homosexuality. This paper equates the uns…[Read more]

In 1894, Lord Alfred Douglas referred to homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name”, a phrase that describes the unmentionable nature of homosexuality in a period of time when sodomy was illegal. Even in the 21st century, there continues to be something unspeakable and forbidden about homosexuality. This paper equates the uns…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article… One of the most striking things about speculative literature of the twenty-first century has been its increasingly focussed interest in imagining impending disaster: from the escalating likelihood of biblical deluge on a planetary scale to looming ecocatastrophes of drought and…[Read more]

This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains…[Read more]

How do we know if animals can think? In extension of the previous debate on human-animal relations, this book analyzes the conditions and contexts of the scientific acquisition of our knowledge of animals. The current discussions within animal philosophy revolve around the three central questions of whether we can attribute a mind to animals, what…[Read more]

In current debates about the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals, knowledge about animals is often adopted from the sciences. However, this largely ignores the fact that relationships of this kind also exist in empirical animal research and that these constellations between researchers and the researched have both ethical and…[Read more]

Animal welfare and animal rights issues have reached the curricula, agendas and priorities of a wide range of educational institutions and initiatives. Their actors are faced with the challenge of not only explaining the relevance of animal ethics and animal rights, but also conceptualising how to teach them: How can animal protection and animal…[Read more]

This paper examines a strand in British television historical drama that presents what I term a “Gothicised” version of history. This actively engages with historical trauma as returning to confront its originating society, as the classic Gothic text represents the returning or ongoing effects of a traumatic past in the narrative present. In Peaky…[Read more]