Research
The term 'practice-led research' has the kind of bureaucratic sterility that makes it sound like something developed by a committee that accepts creativity is an acceptable mode of inquiry, but only if it is sufficiently footnoted and backed by dense theoretical frameworks. What this actually means, in plain English, is that I am a researcher who thinks through making. My work explores life writing, fragmented narratives, and visual culture, primarily through a method I call photo-sketching, which involves taking disconnected moments, layering them side by side, and trusting that meaning will emerge in the gaps. If this sounds suspiciously like how memory works, that is not an accident.
My PhD — Cape Town/ International: The Preparation of a Memoir — is an extended investigation in this exact approach, exploring the way experimental memoirs disrupt linear storytelling by embracing fragmentation as both a form and a philosophy.1 When you start pulling at the threads of autobiography, migration, and cultural memory, you realise that most of the stories we tell about ourselves — whether personal, national, or historical — are not so much chronological narratives as they are aesthetic arrangements of selective remembering. My methodology draws from literature, sociology, and media studies, which is either interdisciplinary or indecisive depending on your perspective.
Current book projects
A South African Childhood (working title)
A memoir in fragments, examining family, postcolonial identity, and cultural memory. Sometimes the best way to tell a story is to take it apart first.
Notes from the Road (working title)
A travel memoir — except instead of glorified tourism, it is about dislocation, self-exploration, and the search for belonging.
Written from Life
Written from Life is a weekly publication on the craft of life writing — memoir, personal essay, and the work of shaping experience into language. The essays focus on the practical and the philosophical in equal measure: how to structure a piece of life writing that doesn't move in a straight line, how to use what you can't remember as deliberately as what you can, how to write honestly about other people, how to trust the fragment when the full picture isn't available.
My thinking on life writing comes from two directions that have become, over time, the same direction. The first is academic: my doctoral research focused on experimental life writing, fragmented narrative, and the photo-sketching practice I developed. The second is personal: I have been writing about my own life for years, badly at first and then better, and the process taught me things about memory and honesty that no amount of theory could have.
The essays are written for practitioners, not academics. While I will on occasion discuss influential life writing, you will not need a reading list.
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Semiotic Drift
Semiotic Drift is a fortnightly publication on media, culture, anxiety, theory, and the way meaning refuses to behave.
On the surface, this is a publication about film, literature, art, digital culture, and the ideas that circulate around them. Nostalgia appears here, though not as sentiment — I am interested in how the past returns in fragments, how history loops back in unexpected forms, and how memory reshapes what it claims to preserve. Digital culture appears here too — not as panic, not as celebration, but as environment, something that structures perception before we fully recognise its influence.
Semiotic Drift sits between theory and autobiography, structure and fragment, analysis and intuition. The footnotes are a feature, not a concession. They are where the second voice lives.
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Selected talks
- How I started my own boutique publishing operation.
York St John University, April 2023.
A reflection on the creative and academic intersections of independent publishing, drawing from my experience founding Analog Submission Press. - Writing a hybrid memoir.
York St John University, December 2022.
An argument for autofiction as a survival mechanism in a world where personal and collective histories bleed into one another. - Notes on the fragment: A fragmentary approach to life writing.
York St John University, April 2022.
A defence of fragmentation as not only a valid but an essential narrative form — and a polite rebuttal to anyone still clinging to the idea that stories need clear beginnings, middles, and ends. - States of drift: applying Guy Debord's dérive to life writing.
York St John University, March 2022.
An exploration of psychogeography, memory, and how wandering a city can turn into an act of autobiography. - Photography and life writing.
York St John University, October 2021.
A discussion of how private photography and fragmented narratives intersect, demonstrating that family photo albums are secretly a form of unreliable memoir.