Teaching and research

My research began with watching the UN's Cambodian peacekeeping operation in 1991 create Homi Bhabha's Third Space in real time; I was amazed at how brazenly and easily the West's conversion therapy was  repurposed to serve local elite priorities, and how that process was largely missed in the West. How did those indigenous institutions prevail against a seemingly weightier opponent? I concluded it was partly because the West was too arrogant to imagine it was possible, and too loathe to imagine their well-intentioned work had been compromised.

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These days I'm concerned with how the evident failure of business and capitalism to behave responsibly and sustainably is studiously ignored, sidelined or denied by academia, business and the media that business owns. It’s not just arrogance. It’s power fused with privilege; judgment shaped by entitlement; emotional emptiness detaching hands from consequence, and reprehensible disingenuity cloaking strategic cruelty. And amidst this violent hegemony is the colonization of our minds, our bodies and our institutions by the unfathomable belief, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that we can keep extracting indefinitely from the planet we depend on, without consequence.

My part in this is concerned with how we get away with hoodwinking and grooming generation after generation into believing capitalism and business are the answer when the competition-fuelled consumption upon which they depend lay at the heart of our existential polycrisis. Fuelling unsustainable consumption is the factual heart of business education; propagating the problem whilst claiming it's the solution is the Orwellian fiction. How is this being sustained? That's the research question I have arrived at, towards the end of my career; the same one I began with, but aimed at a much bigger canvas and with far graver consequences.