Research & Writing
My work sits between critical research and creative practice. I am interested in life writing, fragmented narrative, visual culture, memory, identity, and the ways technologies alter how we write, read, remember, and construct knowledge.
Much of this work begins with a question about form: what happens when experience refuses the shape of a conventional narrative? My research draws across literature, creative writing, media studies, and visual culture to explore the structures through which lives and meanings are assembled.
Doctoral research
Cape Town / International: The Preparation of a Memoir
My doctoral research explored experimental memoir, fragmented narrative, visual culture, memory, identity, place, and self-construction. The thesis combines creative nonfiction with critical and theoretical inquiry rather than separating practice from research.
The work is structured in three parts. Cape Town looks back at family, childhood, South Africa, and personal and collective inheritance. Nebulae: A Discourse in Fragments forms the theoretical spine of the project. International turns to travel, displacement, movement, and belonging.
Across these sections, fragmentation becomes more than a stylistic device. It offers a way to work with the incompleteness of memory, the instability of autobiography, and the gaps between lived experience and the stories later made from it.
Method
Photo-sketching
Photo-sketching is a hybrid image-text practice I developed through my doctoral work. Photographs act as prompts rather than illustrations. They provoke memories, associations, details, contradictions, and absences that become fragments of prose.
The method grew partly from the difference between the way I kept written journals and the way I used a camera. My written records were intermittent. Photographs accumulated continuously. Returning to those images created another kind of archive: incomplete and subjective, but capable of reopening experiences that conventional chronology had lost.
The fragments do not need to resolve into a single, authoritative account. Meaning can emerge through juxtaposition, recurrence, omission, and the space between one fragment and another.
Photograph
The image acts as a visual stimulus and a partial record rather than objective evidence.
Fragment
Memory becomes a short textual unit that can remain incomplete, uncertain, or contradictory.
Constellation
Fragments gather meaning through proximity, repetition, gaps, and changing relationships.
Current work
Research and writing in development
Experimental memoir
Memoir & photo-sketching
I am extending my doctoral research through two memoir projects and a practical study of photo-sketching as a method for writers and creative practitioners.
One memoir returns to childhood in South Africa, family history, post-apartheid identity, memory, and personal and collective inheritance. The other draws from several years of travel to explore movement, distance, belonging, and self-construction.
AI & Higher Education
Critical AI literacy
My current research also examines generative AI in higher education, particularly its use in research, writing, teaching, feedback, assessment, and the development of knowledge.
I am interested in how AI can support thought without weakening source judgement, authorship, creative connection, academic integrity, or the student's responsibility for an argument.
Research & collaboration
Selected projects
Days of the New Town
Conducted oral-history interviews for a York St John University Geography project on Warrington's New Town expansion, with particular attention to memory, place, belonging, personal testimony, and public history.
Reading Barthes: The Preparation of the Novel
Participated in an international interdisciplinary reading group on Roland Barthes's late lectures, with discussions around writing practice, solitude, form, translation, and the unfinished work.
Talks
Selected presentations
How I Started My Own Boutique Publishing Operation
Independent publishing, creative practice, and the development of Analog Submission Press.
Writing a Hybrid Memoir
Autofiction, life writing, personal history, and the instability of conventional autobiographical form.
Notes on the Fragment: A Fragmentary Approach to Life Writing
Fragmentation as both narrative method and a way of thinking about memory and autobiographical form.
States of Drift: Applying Guy Debord's dérive to Life Writing
Psychogeography, movement, place, memory, and wandering as autobiographical practice.
Photography and Life Writing
Private photography, memory, visual evidence, and the relationship between photographs and fragmented autobiographical narratives.
Ongoing writing
Where this work continues
An ongoing archive of fragments and short critical pieces across theory, life writing, visual culture, memory, and digital culture.
Research-led essays on the craft of life writing, with practical approaches to memory, photographs, fragments, family, place, and lived experience.