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@unsw.edu.au

BIO

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

He completed his undergraduate (BSc) and postgraduate (MSc, PhD) 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. 

He is currently book review editor for the Q1 journal Social and Cultural Geography (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rscg20/current)

RESEARCH

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, Andrew is working on four main projects:

1. Cultural Encounters with AI: Trust, Habit, Aesthetics

Roberts T; Lapworth A; Koh L; Ghasri M, 2024, 'Negotiating trust in AI-enabled navigation technologies: imaginaries, ecologies, habits', Social and Cultural Geography, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2024.2399239, ROS ID: 2267346

Hosseini Shoabjareh A; Ghasri M; Roberts T; Lapworth A; Dobos N; Boshuijzen-van Burken C, 2024, 'The role of trust and distrust in technology usage: An in-depth investigation of traffic information apps usage for mandatory and non-mandatory trips', Travel Behaviour and Society, 37, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2024.100816, ROS ID: 2213411

Koh L; Lapworth A, 2024, 'Refiguring habits of subjectivity, communication, and space in online video calls', Area, 56, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/area.12903, ROS ID: 2112572

Lapworth A; Roberts T, 2023, 'Habit, Artificial Intelligence and the Ontological Performance of Trust', Performance Research, 28, pp. 73 - 81, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2334639, ROS ID: 2239699

2. Continental Philosophy and Cultural Geographic Thought and Practice

This project theme reflects broader interests around the implications of continental and post-continental philosophy for contemporary cultural geographical thought and practice, especially around concepts of (non-)representation, nature, technology, the body, subjectivity, the unconscious, ethics, politics, materiality. He has published several papers exploring the implications of the ideas of a range of thinkers for geography, including Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Gabriel de Tarde, and Félix Ravaisson. 

He is currently co-authoring a monograph with Dr. Tom Roberts entitled Cultural Geographies: The Basics due for publication with Routledge in late 2025. 

Lapworth A, 2023, 'Cultural Geographies', in Lees L; Demeritt D (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 85 - 89, ROS ID: 1985309

Lapworth A, 2023, 'Thinking the unconscious beyond the psychoanalytic subject: Simondon, Murakami, and the transductive forces of the transindividual', Social and Cultural Geography, 24, pp. 1501 - 1518, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2073469, ROS ID: 1854674

Gerlach J; Debaise D; Wiame A; Roberts T; Lapworth A; Dewsbury JD; Colebrook C; Williams N; Keating TP, 2023, 'Geophilosophy round table', Subjectivity, 30, pp. 91 - 106, http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41286-023-00150-1, ROS ID: 2020952

Roberts T; Lapworth A; Dewsbury JD, 2022, 'From ‘world’ to ‘earth’: non-phenomenological subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy', Subjectivity, 15, pp. 135 - 151, http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41286-022-00135-6, ROS ID: 1907143

MacLeavy J; Lapworth A, 2020, 'A ‘Post-Work’ World: Geographical Engagements with the Future of Work', Political Quarterly, 91, pp. 310 - 316, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12785,

Williams N; Patchett M; Lapworth A; Roberts T; Keating T, 2019, 'Practising post-humanism in geographical research', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44, pp. 637 - 643, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tran.12322, ROS ID: 1457727

3. Encounters at the Art-Science Interface

A third project has been 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.

Lapworth A, 2023, 'From Coronavirus Tests to Open-Source Insulin and Beyond, 'Biohackers' are Showing the Power of DIY Science', in The Conversation on Biotechnology, JHU Press, pp. 213 - 218.

Lapworth A, 2020, 'Gilbert Simondon and the Technical Mentalities and Transindividual Affects of Art-science', Body & Society, 26, pp. 107 - 134, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1357034x19882750,

Lapworth A, 2016, 'Theorizing Bioart Encounters after Gilbert Simondon', Theory, Culture and Society, 33, pp. 123 - 150, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276415580173

Lapworth A, 2015, 'Beyond Bifurcation: Thinking the Abstractions of Art-Science after A. N. Whitehead', Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology, http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Lapworth_Transformations26.pdf

Lapworth A, 2015, 'Habit, art, and the plasticity of the subject: the ontogenetic shock of the bioart encounter', Cultural Geographies, 22, pp. 85 - 102, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474474013491926

4. Geography, Cinema, and the Politics of Thought

A final project 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, his 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.

Lapworth A, 2021, 'Responsibility Before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation', Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 15, pp. 386 - 410.

Lapworth A, 2019, 'Guattari and the Micropolitics of Cinema: The Desiring-Machines of Satoshi Kon', in Jellis T; Gerlach J; Dewsbury J-D (ed.), Why Guattari? A Liberation of Cartographies, Ecologies and Politics, Routledge, pp. 187 - 201,

Lapworth A, 2019, 'Sensing', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tran.12327,

Lapworth A, 2016, 'Cinema, thought, immanence: Contemplating signs and empty spaces in the films of Ozu', Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 3, pp. 13 - 31, http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jucs.3.1.13_1.