Hi! I’m Benjamin — a Visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where I completed my PhD in Philosophy in 2021.

My academic research focuses on the philosophy of the self, particularly as selves and identities are produced and negotiated in the public and political spaces we share with others. I am particularly interested in identity politics as a arena of political and philosophical deliberation, and as a site of struggle. My PhD thesis consisted of a critical examination of contemporary identity politics and the philosophical underpinnings that can often undermine the pursuit of justice for marginalised peoples. I seek to address these shortcomings through examining alternative ways of understanding the self using phenomenological and existential philosophy.

My current research interests are in social media fora as political spaces, and as spaces wherein we engage in projects of making the self. I’m interested in how the technologies we use to access social media and other online spaces — our interfaces — shape how we experience the world both online and offline, and in how online spaces are structured so as to condition how we can appear online.

Outside of academia, I am an avid reader of fiction (particularly of fantasy), poetry, and history; a student of French and Italian (and sometimes German and Greek); and a keen player of video games (particularly RPGs) and Dungeons and Dragons (I’m a very happy forever DM!).

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