What is this site? Who am I? Why does meaning refuse to stay put? These are, on the surface, very simple questions, except, of course, that they are not.
About this site
Culture | Theory | The Anxiety of Meaning
There is a thing that happens when you try to explain what something is. A recursive spiral, where the very act of definition forces you to acknowledge how unstable definitions actually are. (See also: Derrida, deconstruction, every half-understood reference to différance) Meaning does not hold still. It shifts, flickers, and mutates in real-time, like a poorly compressed image from the early days of the internet,1 and yet, for practical and existential reasons, we keep trying to pin it down. This site is about media, culture, anxiety, theory, and the way meaning refuses to behave.
On a surface level (though we should be suspicious of surfaces, given how much postmodern thought is just a series of arguments about surfaces and depths and whether the distinction even holds up), this is a site about film, literature, art, and the ideas that circulate around them. But if that were all, you could call it a blog and be done with it. What makes this site a little different—what makes it this site rather than just a site—is the particular way it thinks through the problem of meaning. It is about nostalgia, but not in the Buzzfeed ‘Remember This?’ way, more in the Walter Benjamin sense of history as something that loops back on itself in ways we do not fully understand until it is too late. It is about digital culture, but not in the ‘TikTok is rotting our brains’ sense, more in the Marshall McLuhan way that asks whether the medium has already shaped us before we have even had time to think about it.
This site exists at the edges of things—theoretical and personal, structured and fragmented, academic and intuitive. Meaning is messy. This is, among other things, an attempt to sit with that messiness without reducing it to a single neat argument.
About me
Academic | Educator | Overthinker
The problem with bios is that they demand coherence in a way that actual human lives refuse to provide. On paper, I am an academic and educator born in South Africa and based in the UK, specialising in autofiction, autotheory, fragmented narratives, visual culture, and literary criticism. In practical terms, that means I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how stories work, how identity is constructed, and whether anything we write about ourselves is ever really true.
I am interested in the tension between personal experience and critical theory, the ways in which memory and storytelling shape each other, and why certain narratives persist while others fade. My work often explores liminal spaces—where personal narratives dissolve into cultural critique, where theory becomes lived experience, and where traditional genres fail to hold the complexity of what they are trying to contain. If that sounds abstract, it is only because reality itself is.
Outside of writing, teaching, and research, I like cats, travel, walking, and tea, which is another way of saying I enjoy things that are quiet, liminal, and best appreciated in solitude. If you are looking for a more formal version of all this, complete with professional achievements and a neatly structured portfolio, you can find that here.
Think: early JPEGs where compression artefacts turned human faces into an uncanny mess of blurry edges and misplaced pixels. Which is a perfect metaphor for the way meaning degrades and reconfigures itself in digital culture. It is also an apt metaphor for how identity functions under late capitalism.↩