PUBLICATIONS
The Witch: A Pedagogy of Immanence is a deeply personal journey through trauma to resilience and renewal in a process to find the core of an Indigenous way of knowing. Raised a Métis person within white settler culture, ulthiin seeks the seeds of an Indigenous way of being within the texts of their life, looking for the echoes of a hidden, grounded, ecological humanity within the entrails of a culture that eats stories. In an act of epistemological revolution, they seek to reconstruct a lost animist way of being contained within the very core of Western Culture. Witchcraft becomes a set of tools by which the individual may take apart the stories of their own becoming, to engage in parallel deconstructions of the oppressions brought about by settler cultures, finding instead a new path by which humanity may rediscover their place within nature. ulthiin calls for a radical recasting of the human as an emergent phenomena of spirit via nature, calling forth a pedagogy of Eros, of wild erotic passion for the world as a missing piece of the self.
Reparative theory is a means of comprehending the allure of distortions through the fundamental needs they fulfill. Considering the ongoing collapse of consensus reality into a world fractured by multiple intersecting crises, our collective sense of truth is becoming unglued.
Here, conspiritualities like flat-earth theory are emerging as praxes of sense-making. Filling the void left by the absence of a shared narrative, as coercive forms of authority prove inadequate to the task of either processing or suppressing our intensities, I argue that we are becoming disoriented and detached from our phenomenological senses.
The phenomenological rituals of flat-earth theory return to the flatness of the earth to ground the senses in an immanent world, confronting the fragility of a consensus failing to redress its regular production of dissensus. As the pressures of social rupture tear apart the fabric of our existence, dissensus realities offer those on the margins a way to navigate their phenomenological differences—making sense of an incoherent world by radically reducing its complexity. Analyzing primary flat-earth texts, YouTube videos, blog posts, and maps, I explore how Zetetic Astronomy interrogates the epistemological foundations of our current reality with both destructive and liberatory potentials.
The Phenomenology of Dissensus:
Zetetic Rituals for a Flat Earth
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies
Murmurations in the swarm: Trolling in the Age of rhizomatic reproduction
iowyth hezel ulthiin
As identitarian abuse escalates into swarms of online rhetoric, fuelled by sadistic play that is erupting into real-world violence, Pygmalion democracies—fragile systems captivated by their own idealized images—are struggling to manage the cascading internal and environmental crises that they themselves have caused. Contemporary geopolitical powers are increasingly sustaining coherence through the provocation of stochastic terrorism, normalizing swarm behaviours that are intensifying our political atmospheres. These eruptions of violence retrench historic global economic and material hierarchies, dismantling our capacity for vibrant praxis through slow and fast forms of systemic violence.
This chapter explores abuse as a metapolitical system, arguing that the symbolic, literal, and interpersonal dimensions of violence reveals both latent and emergent authoritarian superstructures. Through microfascism, intimate supremacist beliefs embed themselves into local power conditions, tightening the grip of state violence. Recognizing abuse as a geopolitical force, I propose revitalizing political engagement by resisting intimate violence, developing strategies to avoid punitive systems altogether. Centring grassroots somatic resistance, I argue for emergent publics rooted in mutual care and alternative practices of relational security. By confronting authoritarianism in both global systems and intimate dynamics, this approach reframes vulnerability as a site of collective power. Pygmalion democracies must move beyond self-mythologizing to embrace praxis grounded in mutuality, enabling strategies of care able to resist authoritarian dominance.
The Capitol Riots: Digital Media, Disinformation, and Democracy Under Attack
Routledge
The Capitol Riots maps out the events of the January 6, 2021 insurrectionary riots at the United States Capitol building, providing context for understanding the contributing factors and ongoing implications of the uprising.
This definitive text explores the rise of populism, disinformation, conspiracy theories, the alt-right, and white supremacy during the lead-up to and planning of the Stop the Steal campaign, as well as the complex interplay during the riots of political performances, costumes, objectives, communications, digital media, datafication, race, gender, and—ultimately—power. Assembling raw data from social media, selfie photos and videos, and mainstream journalism, the authors develop a timeline and data visualizations representing the events. They delve into the complex, openly shared narratives, motivations, and actions of people on the ground that day who violated the symbolic center of U.S. democracy. An analysis of visual data reveals an affective outpouring of mutually amplifying expressions of frustration, fear, hate, anger, and anomie that correspond to similar logics and counter-logics in the polarized and chaotic contemporary media environment that have only been intensified by COVID-19 lockdowns, conspiracy theories, and a call to action at the Capitol from the outgoing POTUS and his inner circle.
The body is the precondition of any meaning-laden space of learning. As we are located in environments frothing with life, we engage in meaning making through and with the senses of the body, engaging in the creation of scaffoldings of symbolic, rhizomatic understandings by which we navigate our worlds. Thus, I argue that our embodied subjective lives serve as the boundary through which we emerge into an awareness of our place within a network of moving connections. Situating the argument against the mystic poetry of Jal l ad-D n Muhammad R m and the animist philosophy of Isabelle Strengers, I argue that in grounding our educational practices within the body, we have the potential to learn in a way that is more meaningful, personal, and relevant to the subjective process of discovery.
Playing into gendered assumptions, researchers of the alt-right tend to characterize women’s participation as passive, with the demographics of Capitol riots arrestees revealing the predominance of white, middle-aged, middle-class men. However, in our research on digital media and disinformation related to the Capitol riots, we have found that women served key leadership functions in the organization and performance of the riots. They planned events, provided a gentler face for the alt-right, nurtured social cohesion among participants, and shaped the direction of the riots.
