Dr Andrew Lapworth

Scholarships of AUD$35,000 are available for PhD students who achieved H1 /High Distinction in their UG program and/or have completed a Masters by Research. If you are interested, contact me at a.lapworth@adfa.edu.au

Andrew is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography in the School of Science at UNSW Canberra.

He completed his undergraduate and postgraduate education in Geography at the University of Bristol, UK. He was also a Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Bristol before taking up his post at UNSW Canberra in 2019.

His research interests lie in contemporary cultural geography. Specific areas of interest include:

• Continental philosophy and social theory (especially the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Gabriel de Tarde, and Félix Ravaisson).
• Non-representational, post-humanist, and new materialist theories and their implications for geographical thought and practice. 
• Art-science collaborations and encounters
• Cinema and popular visual cultures
• Human-Technology relations

Currently his research is based around three main projects:

1. Encounters at the Art-Science Interface

The first agenda is concerned with how people and communities make sense of a world being dramatically reshaped by developments in science and technology, and the role that art and aesthetic experience can play in communicating, and potentially transforming, that experience. It develops out of Andrew's PhD research which addressed the growing interest within and beyond academia in the emerging field of interdisciplinary 'art-science' collaborations, which use the arts to engage with and critique developments in science and their implications for society. This research draws on recent new materialist and non-representational theories to think in more transformative terms about the ethical and political potentials of art-science encounters, spotlighting the new material practices, transversal spaces, and singular forms of life emerging at the contemporary interface of the arts and sciences. Outputs from this agenda to date include articles in Cultural Geographies, Theory, Culture & Society, and Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture, and Technology, as well as a book chapter on 'transversality' in art-science collaborations. His current research project pushes forward on this research agenda through an exploration of the distinct geographies and material practices of the emerging DIYBio/Biohacking movements, in which everyday spaces are transformed into sites of aesthetic experimentation that facilitate community engagement with biotechnologies. Future plans include articles exploring the technical cultures and mentalities (after Simondon) of these movements, drawing on ethnographic research at sites in Europe and Australia.

2. Geography, Cinema, and the Politics of Thought

The second agenda is concerned with cinematic geographies. A particular focus here is on theorisations of the politics of cinema and its relation to processes of social and cultural change. Eschewing representational approaches that narrowly define this relation in terms of the reification or subversion of already-existing identities, my work instead frames a transformative cinematic politics in terms of its immanent relation to the material event of thinking. Taking inspiration from the film-philosophies of (among others) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean Epstein, he is interested in the capacity of cinematic encounters to express modes of thinking that exceed the human, and which bring about new possibilities of thought that transform our sense and perception of the world. This agenda develops partly out of collaborations with colleagues at Kyoto University looking at the relation of cinema and social change in the context of Japanese cinema. Outputs to date include an article in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies on the immanent cinematic space-times of Yasujiro Ozu and a chapter in the edited collection Why Guattari: A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies, and Politics on micropolitics and the machinic expression of desire in the anime of Satoshi Kon.

3. Continental Philosophy and Geographical Thought and Practice

This final research agenda reflects broader interests around the implications of continental and post-continental philosophy for contemporary geographical thought and practice. Here Andrew works in close collaboration with colleagues in the Difference Laboratory - an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional network of scholars from UNSW Canberra, the Australian National University, and the University of Bristol.