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Carolyn Pedwell is Professor of Cultural Studies and Media at the University of Kent and the author of three monographs: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021); Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014); and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). She is also the co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader II: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023).
Prior to arriving at Kent, Professor Pedwell was Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University (2009-2014) and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London (2008). Carolyn has been Visiting Scholar at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney (2013), the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London (2013-2014), and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics (LSE) (2008-2011). Professor Pedwell completed her PhD in Gender Studies at the LSE in 2007.
Professor Pedwell’s research interests include digital media and culture; emotion and affect; habits and social change; media, cultural and social theory; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial theories.
Professor Pedwell’s current research is developing a post-war genealogy of human-machine relations in Britain and North America oriented around shifting conceptualisations of intuition, with reference to ‘artificial intuition’. Her Leverhulme Fellowship (2020-2021), ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’, explored how digital and computational media are transforming ‘the human’. Leading corporate and scholarly accounts of emergent media, however, entail an implicit universalism that downplays embodied differences and power relations. Arguing that it matters what kind of human our engagements with technology produce, this project is establishing a framework to explore the transformative dynamics of digital media informed by feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.
Professor Pedwell’s recent research project, ‘Habit, Power and Social Transformation’ (2014-2020), explored what habits tell us about social change, power and ‘progressive’ politics at the intersection of neoliberalism, digital culture and transnational politics. Her monograph, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021) argues that seemingly minor everyday habits that are vital to meaningful change. Through its account of influential socio-political processes – from the resurgence and malleability of fascism and white supremacy, to the crafting of new technologies of governance, to the operation of digital media and algorithms – the book rethinks not only how change works but also what counts as change. This project also produced articles in Body and Society; Subjectivity; Cultural Studies; Theory, Culture and Critique; The Thinker; and History of the Human Sciences.
Her previous AHRC Fellowship (2013-2014): ‘Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy’, examined the links between transnational politics and the ‘turn to affect’. Her monograph, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014), explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to 'be empathetic', and their social and geopolitical implications. This project also produced a co-edited special issue (with Anne Whitehead), ‘Affecting Feminism: The Question of Feeling in Feminist Theory’, Feminist Theory (2012) and articles in New Formations; Society and Space; Emotion, Space and Society; Feminist Theory and Samyukta.
Professor Pedwell’s ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008-2009), ‘Gender, Embodiment and Cultural Practice: Exploring Issues in Theory, Media and Policy’, was held at the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths and examined the links between gender, cross-cultural comparison and ‘the body’. This project produced the monograph, Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010).
In addition, Professor Pedwell has conducted research consultancy work on gender relations in digital media; the informal economy, political participation and representation, international development, and social enterprise for organisations including The International Labour Organisation (ILO), The UK Department for International Development (DFID), One World Action, FrankPR and Social Enterprise London.
Professor Pedwell is part of the team teaching Cultural Studies and Media. She convenes and contributes to modules in this field at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Professor Pedwell was External Examiner for the MA in Psychosocial Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London (2017-2021). She was also External Examiner for the MA degrees in Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK (2014-2018).
Please contact Professor Pedwell if you are interested in the areas of media, social and cultural theory; feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial theory; digital media and culture; habit and habituation; emotion and affect; the body and embodied practices.
Current PhD students
Mentorship of postdoctoral research fellows
International keynote and public lecture speaker
Selected recent engagements:
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