My undergraduate and master's research revolves around Habermasian and Foucaultian critical theories and their relations to affects and normativity. My background in critical theory has made me a social theorist/philosopher with a critical and pragmatist orientation. It is my central belief that critique should not aim at solving problems philosophers invent for themselves, but should be motivated by deadlocks our collective experience is already facing. Instead of asking normative questions in the ideal-theory, 'sub-specie-aeternitatis,' manner, I am more interested in normative questions as they arise in the here-and-the-now and the solutions that remain plausible under an adequate understanding of our psychosocial and political situation.
For this reason, my research has been diverse and multidisciplinary. In recent years, I specialize in psychosocial studies, and critical theory in the digital age. I have also been looking into fields such as psychoanalytic theory, critical psychiatry, political economy, and philosophical ethics for inspirations.
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Research Areas:
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Neoliberalism, and Psychoanalysis (PhD Project at EssexU)
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Neoliberal individualism and its reflection in individualized social mania
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Distress under the neoliberal culture of performance and achievement
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Psychiatric power: Medicalization and responsibilization of widespread mental distress as a function of neoliberal governance
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Paranoid Politics: Populism as social fefence against individualized anxieties
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Psychopolitics of the Digital Age
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Algorithmic Subjectivity: How will machine-reinforced power change subjectivity? Should we replace or reconceptualize the 'unconscious' in the digital/cloud age?
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The structural Dissolution of the Public Sphere: Is emancipation no longer possible under digital surveillance societies?
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Psychoanalysis and Politics​
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Psychological defenses (repression, splitting, projection, denial, mania) in social analysis.
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Emancipation, Mourning, and the capacity of 'tolerate frustration'
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'Thinking' and 'containing' (Wilfred Bion) in politics: a missing element for understanding the democratic public sphere?
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Normativity with respect to emotions: We should, but what if we can't control collective emotions?
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The Ethics and Politics of Artificial Intelligence
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Virtue ethical AIs as an alternative to principle-based AIs
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Hybrid Models of Machine Ethics
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Psychoanalysis and Critical Theories​
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Mourning and psycho-moral development
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"Objects" in object-relations theory and Adorno's Negative Dialectics
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The role of psychoanalysis in critical theories. How does the therapeutical aim of psychoanalysis relate to normative ideals of critical theories?
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Is psychic integration in the bad world? (Adorno)
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What are the necessary conditions for functioning communicative relations envisaged by Habermas as the foundations of normative social critique?
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Are objects 'real' or absent? (Lacan)
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