Art Rebellion: The Aesthetics of Social Transformation, Bloomsbury, 2023
Art has always been central to moments of great social change. From the avant-garde to the ages of revolution, the act of rebellious creation has been crucial to bringing people and ideas together. However, in an increasingly fractured world characterised by upheaval and crisis, what role can art play in ushering in transformation?
Paradoxical Urbanism - Anti-Urban Currents in Modern Urbanism, Palgrave, 2021
Paradoxical Urbanism offers concise yet incisive critical discussion of how cities reflect and shape philosophical ideas; and how underlying narratives condition the ways in which cities are built, rebuilt and experienced Written accessibly for students in urban studies, cultural and human geographies, sociology, and architecture, and professionals in city planning, development and culture, it combines first-hand description, polemic and research.
Cities and Literature, Routledge, 2019
A selective, at times personal, view of the relation between (mainly modern) literature and the cities in which it was written, asking how literature reshapes perceptions of city life and urban futures.
Eco-Aesthetics: art, literature and architechture in a period of climate change, Bloomsbury, 2014
Beginning from aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, and environmentalism since the 1960s, an investigation into cultural responses to climate change.
Herbert Marcuse: an aesthetics of liberation, Pluto Press, 2011
A reconsideration of Marcuse’s aesthetic theories from his idea of affirmative culture in the 1930s, through his optimism for the counterculture in the 1960s to the reflectiveness of his last work, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978).