What is this site? Who am I? Why does meaning refuse to stay put?
About this site
Culture | Theory | The Anxiety of Meaning
There is a thing that happens when you try to explain what something is, where the very act of definition forces you to acknowledge how unstable definitions actually are. Meaning 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 perhaps 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, 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.
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 or celebration, but as environment, something that structures perception before we fully recognise its influence.
This site sits between theory and autobiography, structure and fragment, analysis and intuition. 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. I specialise 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 personal stories work, how identity is constructed, and whether anything we write about ourselves is ever really true. 2
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.↩
‘Truth’ is, of course, a slippery term at best and requires far more than a footnote to unpack. But… you get what I mean.↩