My current research-in-progress consists of a series of performative media projects, or ‘media gifts’. These projects are gifts in the sense they operate as part of what has come to be known as the ‘academic gift economy’ whereby research is circulated for free rather than as a market commodity; they are performative in that they do not endeavour to represent the world so much as have an effect in or on it. In other words, they are instances of media that produce the things of which they speak, and which are engaged primarily in and through their actual performance. Operating at the intersections of art, media, philosophy, and literary and critical theory, the different ‘gifts’ in this series each in their own way experiment with the potential that new media technologies hold for making affirmative, affective, singular, ethical and political interventions in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. They include:

•    The open access archive CSeARCH (Cultural Studies e-Archive) 

•    Culture Machine Liquid Books – a series of digital ‘books’ which readers are able to remix, reformat, reversion, reuse, reinvent and republish. 

•    New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader – a ‘liquid book’ edited by myself and Clare Birchall as a follow-up to our 2006 woodware volume, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

•    Liquid Theory TV – a series of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) programmes experimenting with different ways of acting as a ‘public intellectual’ in the current media environment by communicating academic research and ideas to a wider community both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the university.

•    ‘WikiNation’ – a project exploring new ways of organising institutions, cultures, communities and countries, ways which do not uncritically repeat the reductive adherence to democracy, hegemony and Western, bourgeois, liberal humanism that can be found in the institution of academic criticism more widely.

•    ‘The University 3G’ – a proposal, in the form of a mission statement, for a new idea of the university: one which neither goes along with the forces of capitalist neoliberal economics which are increasingly turning higher education into an extension of business; nor advocates a return to the kind of paternalistic and class-bound ideas that previously dominated the university, and which view it in terms of an elite cultural training and the reproduction of a national culture.

•    ‘Pirate Philosophy’ – a project investigating some of the implications of so-called internet piracy for the humanities, particularly the latter’s ideas of authorship, the book, the academic journal, scholarly writing and publishing, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use, content creation and cultural production. ‘Pirate Philosophy’ explores such ideas both philosophically and legally through the creation of an actual ‘pirate’ text using peer-to-peer BitTorrent networks.