Professor Robert Hassan

IAS Fellow at Josephine Butler College, January - March 2023

Professor Robert Hassan has a BA in Politics and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Swinburne University, in Melbourne Australia. Since 2011, he has taught at the University of Melbourne in the School of Culture and Communication, where he was Head of Media and Communications between 2014 and 2018. He is currently Director of the media and communications MA program; and teaches into BA, MA, and PhD courses. He has held visiting Fellowships in Cardiff University, working with Professor Barbara Adam, and has guest lectured in Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Baroda, India, and conducted workshops on the politics of time and memory in Srebrenica, Bosnia. From 2010 until 2022 he was Editor-in-Chief of Time and Society. 

Professor Hassan’s research work is at the intersections of politics, media, political economy, technology, and temporality. He has written twelve books that explore these conjunctions, and have been translated into Chinese, Arabic and Korean. His most recent book is Analog, published by (MIT Press, 2022) which is a consideration of the question: ‘are human’s analogue creatures in a digital world?’ Earlier work, such as The Condition of Digitality (University of Westminster Press, 2020) took the analogue-digital question through the framework of a neo-Marxist approach to consider the possibilities for meaning political action in a planet dominated by platform capitalism and the seeming difficulty in that context of imagining a future world that has transcended capitalism. His book Uncontained (Grattan Street Press, 2020), was an autoethnographic account of a four-week journey on a container ship from Melbourne to Singapore, with no access to digital media of any kind, so to discover the effects ‘digital detox’ on the subjective experience of time and memory.

Current projects continue these themes and are being developed in two concurrent book projects: Philosophy of Analog, which is a deeper working through of the problems discussed in Analog; and Digital Journalism which discussed the problems of truth, fact, history, and political action in the age of post-neoliberal digitality.

As an IAS Fellow, Professor Hassan will collaborate on the IAS supported project Risks to Youth and Studenthood: commodification, transitions and digital identities led by Dr Rille Raaper (Education) and Dr Mariann Hardey (Management and Marketing).

Events

IAS Seminar - 09 March 2023- 1.00 - 2.00pm.  IAS Seminar Room, Cosin's Hall, Institute of Advanced Study
Note note this event has been rescheduled from 27 February 2023 
Analog to Digital and the Loss of Resonance: humans and technology from the perspective of philosophical anthropology
Registration is essential. Details here. 

IAS IAS Public Lecture  - 18 January 2023 - 5.30 - 6.300pm, Josephine Butler College, Durham University
The Revenge of the Analog: Or why you really want that fifty quid vinyl copy of ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’ 
Further information here.