• Political Ontology and Radical Democracy

    I am interested in questions concerning the nature of politics, what it means for something to be, or become, political, and the extent to which the political shapes, informs and constitutes the social.

  • The Politics of Internet Histories and Futures

    I am interested in historical and contemporary instantiations of digital democracy, platform politics and cyberspace imaginaries.

  • The Politics of Cultural Memory & Histories of Socio-Technical Thought

    I am interested in political-theoretical interventions into memory studies, historiography and the consequences of the technospheric condition for cultural reproduction.

Book Review: Returning to Judgment: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory by Ben Turner

Ranger, J. (2023). Book Review: Returning to Judgment: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory by Ben Turner, Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology, 2(1),1-5.

Towards a Resonant Theory of Memory Politics

Ranger, J., & Ranger, W. (2023). Towards a resonant theory of memory politics. Memory Studies, 16(2), 451–464.

It is argued that Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance provides memory activists (those actors engaged in memory politics) with both a normative justification and qualitative metric by which sites of memory may be compared and evaluated. Resonance is a plausible candidate for an assessing concept on the grounds that there is overlap between Rosa’s sociological approach and the implicit appeal to resonance in the memory studies literature.

Slow Down! Digital Deceleration Towards A Socialist Social Media

Ranger, J. (2020). Slow Down! Digital Deceleration Towards A Socialist Social Media. tripleC: communication, capitalism, critique, 18(1), 254-267.

Hartmut Rosa argues that three systems of social acceleration (technical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and the acceleration of the pace of life) have emerged as fundamental to the human experience of late modernity. It is here argued that the digital imaginary, specifically curated by the “universal” social media platforms causes what Dominic Pettman has dubbed the “hypermodulation” of the subject, which contributes to the reproduction of the capitalist status quo. Consequently, I here argue that a socialist approach to the digital must commit to what Rosa would term an ideological (oppositional) deceleration to counteract such tendencies.