Research

I am currently at work on two research projects. The first is a book-length study of the rhetorical corporatization of university governance structures. I am concerned to unpack the necessary relationship between how we speak about universities, and the way that this speech—this rhetoric—materializes and reifies neo-liberal ideology in twenty-first century conceptions of the University. Essential points in my rhetorical critique focus on market-driven metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), rhetorics of “excellence,” market fundamentalism and branding, and the corporate governance structures that follow from all these, including faculty unions, university administrations, Governing Boards, and larger umbrella organizations, such as the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

In a different vein, I am currently working on an article concerning graphic novels and Giorgio Agamben’s legal understanding of the “state of exception.” Graphic novels materialize what Agamben refers to as the “juridical void” that emerges when there is a fundamental mismatch between political and juridical realms—the state of exception. Graphic novels, such as those by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, depict “superheroes” who are exemplary inhabitants of an extra-judicial space who at once aim to reinstate the law where there is lawlessness, but simultaneously exhibit the very vigilantism that produces lawlessness in the first instance. What interests me, then, is the paradoxical situation that graphic novels about superheroes present: superheroes cannot reinstate the law precisely because they operate outside it—may themselves be the cause of the very lawlessness they so desperately try to contain. Superheroes do not uphold the law—they only ever, to use Agamben’s words, “depose it.”