SCHOLARSHIP

01 · PUBLISHED WORK

Published Scholarship

Prior to KU, my work involved looking at narratives of corporate social responsibility through the lens of deconstruction, spawning a dissertation that framed CSR as ‘undecidable’, meaning neither good nor bad, but an ambiguous signifier that flips between the two and its final outcome yet to be decided. Upon arriving at KU, I’ve developed a research trajectory that looks at how Public Relations functions to condition our understanding of the Anthropocene, and why action on climate continually becomes stuck on definitions, disclosures, and direction.

Research Trajectory

Prior to KU, my work involved looking at narratives of corporate social responsibility through the lens of deconstruction, spawning a dissertation that framed CSR as ‘undecidable’, meaning neither good nor bad, but an ambiguous signifier that flips between the two and its final outcome yet to be decided.

From there, I landed my first TT gig at PSU York, where my major research accomplishment was the publication a monograph entitled Plasticity in Motion: Sport, Gender, and Biopolitics. My department wanted me to research more into sports, since that was my professional background prior to academia, and I created a brand new class to fit into a very constrained major to fulfill the gender studies component (Sport + Gender). The monograph used a post-deconstructive theorist in Catherine Malabou to look at how sport crafts forms which bodies–whether they be male, female, or other-than–are ideologically shaped. Malabou’s theory that our brains are plastic, and can change throughput our lifetimes removes some of the biological determinism rampant in sports scholarship and thinking.

This was a departure from my original research question into how do we exist in the Anthropocene when norms, institutions, and planetary conditions seem to be failing us. I felt Malabou had little to offer to this question, so I moved to another fellow Derrida student in Bernard Stiegler to help guide this question. This is where my research has taken me, and with the submission of another monograph in Nihilism Inc. I can finally orient how my scholarship (CSR, critical theory) and teaching (Public Relations) interact with one another.

The issue I have circled is that sustainability, like CSR before it, is a term that both hampers and accelerates us towards extinction threats. The way I’ve often explained it is from quoting Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, where Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) becomes radicalized by a parishioner’s husband about existential threats looming on the horizon, and rather than taking a blank check from the local oil baron to fix his church, shouts at him in a diner “Well, someone has to do something!” Hawke’s performance is a stand-in for the audience, who is perilously watching as climate disaster moves closer and closer through our phones, until it is at out doorstep.

What makes this a successful trajectory where before it faltered is centering on the work of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler appears dark, writing books with titles such as Symbolic Misery and Decadence of Industrial Democracies, but within his work he applies a thinking of technics to these problems that renders them as pharmacological. Not in the prescription drug sense, but from Derrida’s excitation of the Greek pharmakon, meaning both poison and cure. We need to promote technologies that enhance the therapeutic side, enabling societies that take care and promote social well-being. Sustainability, in this sense, is not a pharmakon; rather, industrial technologies like public relations (promotion, community building, organizing, activism, mutual aid, care) are. Sustainability instead creates a stasis, or malaise, where massive amounts of effort are poured into strategies to keep things the same rather than changing our energy infrastructures, our social connections, and ourselves.

All of which is an easy fix. Wave my hand, I’ve solved the world’s problems. The reason PR, and additionally (as I argue in Nihilism Inc.) finance are needed for a better future is that they mobilize action out of this malaise. They can, pharmacologically, get us unstuck. The Green New Deal relies on ideations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to help finance these giant infrastructure projects, and break us from a cycle of austerity; renewables technologies continue to improve and and need public backing for a healthier and more equitable energy market; and PR helps connect, communicate, and simplify this massive problem which is too large for any one person to wrap their had around, let alone fix or take on.

We are consistently told both that the world is ending and that we shouldn’t do anything about it. This depressive surrender is a manufactured malaise by current hyperindustrial PR campaigns. My research aim is to examine the toxic elements of the PR pharmakon so that in my teaching practice I can highlight alternatives, or thinking otherwise about PR (as activism; as networks, as change) so I can help students imagine better futures.