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Humanities Division
History of Consciousness Department
PhD Candidate
History of Consciousness
Graduate
Humanities & Social Sciences Building
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/9767447036?pwd=enZWZ0pQRVNLNHJwMStjRE9SZURNQT09
History Of Consciousness
I’m a PhD candidate in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working across communication and cultural studies, social and political theory, and the sociology of knowledge. My research concerns how people produce a shared social world, how its institutions acquire power over them, and how they can understand and transform its organization. I approach these questions through the study of capitalism, media, political authority, and the institutions of knowledge. I publish as Shaun Hwang.
With Cara Greene and Kyle Proehl, I’m coediting Crisis and the California Ideology, to be published by De Gruyter Brill, which grew out of a research project and conference supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. We approach California as both a historical place and a globally influential image of freedom, examining how technological utopianism, libertarianism, and counterculture are bound up with capitalist development, racial domination, and militarism. In my introduction to the volume, I ask how promises of innovation and self-transformation can make economic dependence and concentrated power appear desirable. Contributors include Alberto Toscano, Banu Bargu, Massimiliano Tomba, and James Martel.
In my first book project, Exceptional Media and the Making of Fascism: Myth, Paramilitarization, and Direct Domination, I examine how media institutions, political organizations, and organized violence become aligned in the making of fascist power. Comparing Italy and Germany, I investigate how fascist movements preserve capitalist property relations while transforming the institutions through which people organize, contest authority, and interpret their circumstances. I use “exceptional media” to describe institutions and practices that turn explanations of crisis into justifications for overriding restraints on political power and suppressing opposition. I’m also developing a contemporary interview study in the United States, examining how work, family, religion, and media shape perceptions of threat and the acceptance or rejection of exclusion and coercion.
In my planned second book, We, the Demiurge: Communication, Pseudoconcreteness, and Social Form, I develop an account of communication grounded in the historically specific relations through which people reproduce their lives. I begin from a problem: we collectively produce a world that we do not collectively govern. Starting with interpersonal communication and learning, I examine how people participate in making relations of labor, race, and gender that can come to appear as natural facts or independent powers. I ask what forms of communication and collective organization could make those relations intelligible and open to transformation.
In 2026, I founded the Sociology of Scientific Labor Working Group at UC Santa Cruz. We investigate how employment conditions, funding, institutional hierarchies, and the division of labor shape scientific inquiry. We’re planning a conference on scientific funding and governance under the Trump administration and a workers’ inquiry involving researchers in investigating their own working conditions. Alongside our collective reading, these activities address who defines research problems, who performs and receives credit for the work, and what power researchers have to change its organization and purposes.
My work draws on Marxist philosophy and cultural theory, combining conceptual argument with historical comparison, institutional analysis, and interpretation of media and everyday life. My articles address the wage relation and social reproduction, Marx’s account of social form, political temporality, and the aesthetics of contemporary crisis. I’m interested in how institutions enable or restrict the work through which people produce knowledge, test their interpretations, and act on the conditions of their shared lives.
I have a very sweet, interesting, fun, curious daughter named Jovie.
Communication and cultural studies; social and political theory; Marxist philosophy; political economy of media and knowledge; fascism and authoritarianism.
Ideology and political communication; capitalism and social reproduction; fascism and authoritarianism; philosophy and sociology of knowledge; scientific labor; cultural theory; aesthetics and film; temporality and social change; collective organization and democratic self-government.
My teaching connects communication, cultural analysis, and social and political theory. At UC Santa Cruz, I’ve taught What Is Communication? and Fascism and Film as instructor and co-taught an independent study on the phenomenology and temporality of the transition to capitalism. My teaching interests include communication theory, Marxist philosophy, political economy, ideology, aesthetics and film, and the philosophy and sociology of science. I emphasize close reading, clear writing, and the analysis of concrete social and historical problems.
2026 History of Consciousness Outstanding Teaching Assistant
2026 History of Consciousness Summer Spring–Summer Travel and Research Grant
2025 Tribeca and History of Consciousness Summer Research Grant
2024 Tribeca and History of Consciousness Summer Research and Travel Grant
2023–2024 UCHRI Grant for The California Ideology Working Group
2023 Affiliated PhD Student at American University of Beirut
2023 Summer STARS Re-entry Scholarship
2023 History of Consciousness Travel Funding
2022–2023 UCHRI Grant for Alt-Right Media Literacy Series
2022 History of Consciousness Travel Funding
2022 Summer STARS Re-entry Scholarship
2022 Summer Graduate Dean’s Travel Grant
2022 History of Consciousness Summer Research Support
2021–2022 Regents Fellowship
2026 Presentation: “Corrupted Forms of Life: The Wage-Form, Metabolic Rift, and Social Morphology,” at Planetary Warscapes Ablaze: Imperial Mutations in Infernal Times, Historical Materialism London
2026 Panel discussant: “Beyond the Postcolony,” at Decolonization and the Left, UCSC Platypus Affiliated Society2026 “Revolutionary Stratigraphy: Temporal Sedimentation and Political Form in Revolution and Restoration,” at Revolution and Restoration: A Conversation, UCSC
2025 “Abstraction and Appearance: Lifshitz, Benjamin, and the Aesthetic Logic of Fascism,” at Resurgent Reaction: Marxist Strategies at the End of the Liberal Order, Historical Materialism London
2025 “Scientific Practice in Fascist Times: Beyond Capitalism’s Two Faces,” at 2nd International Symposium of Marxism & Sciences Journal, Romania
2025 “Fascist Epistemology: Abstract Materialities and Myths,” at Combating the Catastrophe, Historical Materialism Paris
2025 “Life, Death, and the Mythological Machine,” at Life and Death, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy Graduate Conference (Kingston University, London)
2025 “Crisis, Preventive Counterrevolution, and Capitalist Media,” at Organizing in the Capitalocene, Historical Materialism Athens
2025 “Forget Critical Theory: A Critique of Modern Witnessing,” at Media Fields: Witnessing, UCSB
2024 “Capitalism and The Phenomenon of Mass Fear,” at Polycrisis across Divides, Historical Materialism Cluj-Napoca
2024 “Immediate Transcendence and Purifying Violence: On Surfer Fascism,” at California Ideology, UCSC
2024 “Fragmentation and Intensification: On the Liberal Dissolution of Authority and The Fascist Tragedy of Authority’s Simulacrum,” Authority and Its Discontents, Fides Quaerens at Villanova University
2023 “Fragmentation and Intensification: On the Capitalist Production of Fascist Culture” at Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts, American University of Beirut
2023 “Modern Dialectical Intensification and The Capitalist Production of Far-Right Habitus” at Spatialities of the Right: Practices and Tactics of the Far-Right, American Association of Geographers Conference
2022 “Modern Dialectical Intensification and Fascist Compensation” at Culture and Theory in Reactionary Times, University of Minnesota
2022 “Fragmentation, Fascism, and the Grendel Academy” at The Spectre Haunting Academia: Understanding the Role of Academia in the Rise of the Far-Right, University of Heidelberg
Edited Volume
Forthcoming with Cara Greene and Kyle Proehl. Crisis and the California Ideology. Berlin: DeGruyter Brill, forthcoming.
Academic Articles
2027 “The Wage-Form as Crisis-Form: Value, Need, and the Practice of Social Mediation.” Problematique: Journal of Political Studies/Revue d’études politiques 17, forthcoming.
2027 “Revolutionary Stratigraphy: Temporal Sedimentation and Political Form in Revolution and Restoration.” Philosophy Today 71(3), forthcoming summer 2027.
2026 “Ouroboros, Part Two: ‘Western Marxism’ and Marx’s Theory of Dynamic Form.” Marxism & Sciences 9, forthcoming.
2026 “Exceptional Media: Abstraction and the Fascist Organization of Crisis.” forthcoming.
2026 “Spectacular Annihilation: On Contemporary Apocalyptic Aesthetics.” Mythos: Journal für Ästhetik 1(2): 112–21.
2026 “Ouroboros, Part One: Systems Theory and Marx.” Marxism & Sciences 8: 111–32.
Para-Academic Articles
2024 “Imane Khelif, Immediate Transcendence, and Fascism,” in Blue Labyrinths (https://bluelabyrinths.com/2024/09/10/imane-khelif-immediate-transcendence-and-fascism/)
2022 “The Conformist: Liberal Habitus in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” in Judas, As botas de, (https://revista.judasasbotasde.com.br/332022/the-conformist-liberal-habitus-in-hegels-phenomenology-of-spirit/), Brasil
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