Gary Hall

Gary Hall is an experimental writer, editor and publisher. He works (and makes) at the intersections of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures which brings together theorists, practitioners, activists and artists. He is also Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University in the US.

His research focuses on non-liberal humanist forms of collaboration and the knowledge commons, as well as questions around class, elitism and digital capitalism. It has appeared in Radical Philosophy, New Formations, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, American Literature and Angelaki, and has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and Slovenian. He is the author of a number of books. They include, most recently, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). In addition, he is co-author of Open Education: A Study In Disruption (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006).

He has a history of creating norm-critical collaborative research contexts. In 1999 he co-founded the contemporary theory journal Culture Machine. In 2006 he co-founded the open access publishing house Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs. He also co-edited OHP's Liquid Books series and the Jisc-funded Living Books About Life series. OHP is a founder member of both the Radical Open Access Collective and ScholarLed, with Hall currently being co-PI on the associated £3 million Research England and Arcadia Trust funded Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project.

He has given lectures and seminars at institutions around the world, including the Australian National University, Cambridge University, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, K.U. Leuven, Lund University, Monash University, New York University, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in China, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Wellcome Collection in London.

He is currently developing a series of politico-institutional interventions that experiment with digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, contemporary theory in relation to the city and public institutions such as the art gallery, the library and the museum. He is also completing a new monograph: Masked Media: What Comes Afer Liberalism, New Materialism and Situated Knowledges.

He has written on class, the commons, copyright, cultural analytics, data, metadata, digital capitalism, digital humanities, the history and future of the book, media archaeology, new materialism, open access, open education, piracy, the posthuman, posthumanities, Marxism, post-Marxism, psychoanalysis, the quantified self, the sharing/gig economy, secrecy, the university, and on the philosophy of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Hardt and Negri, Mouffe, Stiegler and Braidotti. He is associated with the development of a number of critical concepts and practices, including open media, liquid theory, living books, radical open access, the microentrepreneur of the self, affirmative disruption, disruptive humanities, masked media, uberfied university/uber.edu, übercapitalism, anti-bourgeois theory and pirate philosophy. (2022)

Links

• Website
• https://hcommons.social/@garyhall (Mastodon), [1]
• Profile on U Coventry
• Centre for Postdigital Cultures
• Centre for Disruptive Media
• Wikipedia