This research cluster aims to study and apply radical theories of politics to generate new understanding of significant social, cultural and technical objects. We draw inspiration from the work of philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, who coined the malleable term ‘political technology’ to describe a variety of social and cultural phenomena ranging from prison design to the practice of confession. Our objective is to foster understanding of critical and activist work on the following types of political technology in particular, within and across different national, cultural and linguistic areas:

• emancipatory political theory and practice (in particular around ‘race’/ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social class);
• sociogenesis and decolonial practice, in particular psychosocial questions of decolonisation or ‘disenclosure’ (Mbembe);
• ‘somatechnics’ and practices of embodiment;
• techniques of the self and ‘anthropotechnics’ (Sloterdijk), including biomedical technologies;
• bureaucracy, administrative rationality and the passion for order;
• conspiracy theory and misinformation/disinformation;
• digital technologies of surveillance and governance.

Our understanding of politics is broad: we believe it extends far beyond political parties, systems and electoral cycles and that many of the most significant political technologies of the Modern and contemporary eras have been developed and taken effect transnationally.

To join the cluster or for more information about our activities please email Oliver Davis at odavis@ucc.ie 

Upcoming events

Derek Hook’s lecture: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is a singular and inexhaustible text, one which repeats multiple re-readings and reconceptualizations. Part of what is most impressive about Fanon’s book—aside from its ability to speak to multiple subsequent generations and standpoints—is its ability to generate new concepts, to adapt and ‘vernacularize’ philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts to critical ends. This talk will highlight a handful of such concepts (including the zone of nonbeing, Fanon’s idea of disruptive temporality, and the role of the colonial voice) with the dual aim of making them accessible and critically useful to us today.

Sinan Richards & Derek Hook (eds.), Fanon and Lacan: Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2026) contends that Frantz Fanon didn’t just apply psychoanalysis — he reworked it. Through Lacan’s mirror stage, the imago, and the body-in-pieces, Fanon turned psychoanalysis into a vernacular practice for diagnosing the socio-psychological traumas of colonialism and racialised power. This collection traces that dialogue, from a comparative historical study of Fanon and Lacan to the roles of Mannoni, Merleau-Ponty, Tosquelles, and others — opening new pathways for confronting the unconscious foundations of racism and exclusion, and tools for disalienation and liberation.

Derek Hook is a Professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University, USA, and an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. A scholar and practitioner of psychoanalysis, he is one of the editors (along with Calum Neill) of the Palgrave Lacan Series and of the four-volume Reading Lacan’s Écrits (with Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule). He is the author of Fanon, Psychoanalysis and a Critical Psychology of the Decolonial (2025), Whiteness at the Abyss (2025) and the co-editor of Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology (with Leswin Laubscher) and the co-editor of Lacan and Race (with Sheldon George). 

Sinan Richards is a lecturer in French at UCC, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. He is the author of Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan (Palgrave, 2023). Most recently, Sinan has published a collection (with Thomas Waller), Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism and (with Derek Hook) Fanon and Lacan: Decolonial Psychoanalysis (2026). Sinan has published widely in, for example: The Journal of Humanistic Psychology and Paragraph. Sinan serves as a member of the editorial boards of French Studies and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. 

The event is free, but places can be reserved in advance here. For more information contact SRichards@ucc.ie. 

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