Kieran Cutting

k.l.cutting2@newcastle.ac.uk

My background is in interdisciplinary social sciences, primarily focusing on the intersection between political theory, geographies, philosophy and phenomenologies. During my BA at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus, I conducted a number of studies concerning the presence of the university in a relatively small, rural town and the impacts the student population had upon the long-term resident community, producing a research-driven board game to aid Neighbourhood Planning and a practice-based ontological framework founded on radical political theory and participatory video. The latter study found that the division between student communities and the long-term resident communities they live in are reinforced by university structures and values.

As a result, I am currently interested in how policy decisions and structures of Higher Education Institutions form the subject of ‘the university student’ and its associated identities and ontological frameworks. Within this, I am specifically interested in the potentials of digital technologies to disrupt the subjectification process and unlock new resonances which might allow for a more radical, student-centred pedagogy to come to prominence, and which might allow for better integration of students with civic society as a whole.