Research output per year
Research output per year
Accepting PhD Students
PhD projects
I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in researching organisations that operate outside, alongside, or against dominant managerial and market logics. This includes — but is not limited to — worker and consumer cooperatives, social and solidarity economy initiatives, mutual aid networks, community-led healthcare and social infrastructure, self-managed workplaces, occupied factories, squats and social centres, intentional communities, activist collectives, and grassroots social movements.<br/>I am particularly interested in supervising projects that take seriously the organisational dimensions of these initiatives: how they make decisions, sustain themselves materially, navigate tensions between horizontality and effectiveness, relate to the state and to capital, build solidarity across difference, and reproduce (or transform) themselves over time. Projects engaging questions of organisational democracy, prefigurative politics, resistance, refusal, mutualism, and community self-management are especially welcome.<br/>I am open to a wide range of methodological approaches, including ethnographic, participatory, action-research, archival, and theoretical work. I am sympathetic to projects in which doctoral researchers have existing connections to the organisations or movements they wish to study, and to research designs that take the political commitments of those organisations seriously rather than treating them as objects of detached analysis.<br/>Theoretically, my own work draws on critical organisation studies, continental political philosophy, and political economy, but I am happy to supervise students working from adjacent traditions — including autonomist Marxism, anarchist political theory, feminist organisation studies, decolonial thought, and post-foundational political theory.<br/>Prospective applicants are warmly encouraged to get in touch with an outline of their interests and a draft proposal before formally applying. I am happy to discuss ideas at an early stage and to advise on shaping a project that fits both your interests and Northumbria's research environment.
I am an Assistant Professor in Organisation Studies at Newcastle Business School. My research explores resistance, organisational democracy, and the cooperative, mutualist, and solidarity-economy practices through which people organise themselves outside, alongside, and against dominant managerial and market logics. My monograph The Primacy of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2021) develops an account of resistance as constitutive rather than reactive.
Much of my recent empirical work focuses on community-led and democratically organised healthcare. I co-founded and coordinate the International Network of Social Clinics (INOSC), a European network of solidarity clinics that emerged in response to austerity and now provides a comparative basis for ongoing research on mutualism, organisational democracy, and community self-management in health and social care.
I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in alternative, self-managed, and activist organisations — including cooperatives, social and solidarity economy initiatives, mutual aid networks, community-led healthcare, occupied workplaces, and grassroots collectives.
My research sits at the intersection of critical organisation studies, political economy, and continental political philosophy. I am particularly interested in the everyday forms of resistance, refusal, and disobedience that shape — and are shaped by — organisational life, and in the cooperative, mutualist, and solidarity-economy practices through which people organise themselves outside, alongside, and against dominant managerial and market logics.
A long-standing strand of my work draws on Étienne de La Boétie, Michel Foucault, and Mark Fisher to develop an account of resistance as constitutive rather than reactive — an argument set out in my monograph The Primacy of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2021) and continued in current work on voluntary servitude, capitalist realism, and the politics of organisational subjectivity.
Empirically, much of my recent research focuses on community-led and democratically organised healthcare, particularly the European network of social clinics that emerged in response to austerity. I co-founded and coordinate the International Network of Social Clinics (INOSC), which provides a comparative basis for ongoing work on mutualism, organisational democracy, and community self-management in health and social care.
Management, PhD
1 Jun 2016 → 31 Dec 2099
Award Date: 1 Jun 2016
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review