About

I am a former senior research leader in UK higher education, now working as an independent consultant and a part-time doctoral candidate at York St John University.

For roughly twenty years I led Research and Innovation Services at Teesside University, working with academics, public bodies, and third sector organisations to secure over £50 million in research and innovation funding. It was rewarding work, but it always kept me at one remove from the research itself — facilitating other people’s ideas rather than pursuing my own.

Taking early retirement gave me the chance to change that.

I am now embarking on a part-time PhD exploring the digital life of conspiracy culture through the lens of hauntology. The working title is Haunted by Lost Futures — a phrase borrowed in spirit from Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of a culture trapped in the past, unable to imagine new futures. My question is a simple one: when that haunting goes online, what does it become?

The research draws on hauntological theory, digital folklore, and sociological methods including ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism — somewhere between Derrida’s spectres, Fisher’s lost futures, and the fever-dreams of the contemporary internet.

This blog is where I think out loud: research notes, theoretical reflections, and the experience of being a sixty-year-old sitting in seminars again, reading things that challenge and occasionally bewilder me, and rediscovering what it feels like to be a student.

I am based in the North East of England and run an independent consultancy offering grant writing, bid writing, and strategic advisory services to public sector and third sector clients.