Gary Hall

My research is characterised by its experimentation with:

1. Working collaboratively and collectively.

2. Operating according to a non-profit philosophy.

3. Acting in a non-rivalrous, non-competitive fashion to explore new models for property, ownership and the economy.

4. Taking a hyper-political approach.

5. Gifting labour as a means of developing notions of the community, the common and of commoning that break with the conditions supporting the unified, sovereign, proprietorial subject.

6. Generating projects that are concerned, not only with representing or critiquing the world, but also with intra-acting with the world in order to make things happen.

7. Interrogating those fundamental propositions that are often taken for granted by media theory. The list is a long one. It includes data, the digital, the human, technology, the printed text, the network and copyright. Other propositions that are assumed by theorists when drawing conclusions about the media are capitalism, liberalism, humanism, freedom, democracy, community, communism, and the commons.

8. Engaging with the existing institutions – especially those to which theorists are most closely tied such as the university, the library, and the scholarly publishing industry – so as to transform them.

9. Using different personas or masks to experiment with producing multiple authorial ‘I’s, different to the liberal humanist subjectivity that is the default adopted by even the most supposedly radical of theorists.

10. Reinventing both the humanities and the posthumanities as the inhumanities by adopting ways of being and doing as theorists that actually take account of and assume an intra-active relation with the nonhuman.

(For more, see The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play (Boulder: The Techne Lab, University of Colorado, 2017).

Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Exective Doirector of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. A critical theorist and media philosopher working in the areas of digital culture, politics and technology, he is author of a number of books, including Pirate Philosophy (MIT, 2016), The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota, 2016), Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota UP, 2008), and Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002). He is also co-author of Open Education (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006), and Experimenting (Fordham UP, 2007). He has over 30 peer-reviewed publications in edited books and academic journals, including American Literature, Angelaki, Cultural Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, New Formations, The Oxford Literary Review, Parallax and Radical Philosophy.

In 1999 he co-founded the open access journal Culture Machine, an early champion of OA in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs. He also co-edited OHP's Liquid Books series and the Jisc-funded Living Books About Life series. OHP is a founder member of both the Radical Open Access Collective and ScholarLed, with Hall currently being co-PI on the associated Research England and Arcadia Trust funded Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project.

He blogs at: www.garyhall.info