Dr Tom Roberts

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, please contact me at thomas.roberts@adfa.edu.au.

Tom is a Senior Lecturer in cultural geographer based in the School of Science at UNSW Canberra. His research explores the novel forms of material agency emerging in our increasingly technologically-mediated environments, including things like artificial intelligence (AI) and experiments with new materials. Tom's work contributes to a number of cutting-edge conceptual debates in cultural geography, including:

• More-than-human geography (e.g., post-humanism, new materialism)
• Relational thinking (e.g., assemblage theory, process philosophy)
• Non-anthropocentric theories of perception, experience and subjectivity (e.g., post-phenomenology, affect theory)
• Non-representational research methodologies (e.g., material ethnographies, experimental writing practices)

Tom's work is currently focused on three interrelated research agendas:

1. Society and culture 'beyond' the human

Social science research is often based on unacknowledged assumptions about what it means to be human, many of which are outdated, rigid and philosophically suspect. Drawing on cultural geography's rich tradition of thinking critically about 'the human', Tom's research explores and develops alternative approaches to social science that are more open to the entanglements of human-nonhuman that we see proliferating in the 21st Century (particularly in the case of new technologies). This agenda includes work on Spinoza's Ethics, published in the interdisciplinary journal GeoHumanities, as well as engagements with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, published in Progress in Human Geography, Alfred-North Whitehead's process philosophy, published in Dialogues in Human Geography.  

2. Conceptualizing material agency

The second aspect of Tom's research investigates the nonhuman dimensions of social and cultural life through a focus on material agency. Inspired by recent developments in new materialist theory and science and technology studies, Tom's research draws attention to forms of material agency that are often overlooked in contemporary accounts of social and cultural processes. Tom's work in this area includes an experimental ethnographic engagement with the vibrant matter of an IKEA superstore, published in Environment and Planning A; a philosophically-speculative analysis of smart materials and their application in architectural design contexts, published in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space; and a conceptual analysis of assemblage thinking, published in Area. 

3. Understanding the social and cultural implications of technological change

Technological change and its impact on the human is an area of particular interest in Tom's research. He has undertaken research on the cultural implications of 3D-printing technologies, published in cultural geographies journal. Tom is also the originator and course convenor of a masters course entitled Understanding Socio-technical Systems: Ideas, Spaces & Cultures. He is currently involved in an interdisciplinary research project investigating how trust is negotiated by everyday users of AI technologies, and has published outcomes of this research in leading journals including Social and Cultural Geography and Travel Behaviour and Society. As a keen photographer, he is also fascinated by the evolving techno-aesthetics of photography and its impact on human perception.