I’ve published essays in disciplinary journals of political theory, in peer-reviewed interdisciplinary outlets, and in public-facing fora. Here are some highlights.
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Engels after Frankfurt: Nature and Enlightenment in Critical Theory
New German Critique, vol. 50, no. 1, 2023
An essay on the relationship between Friedrich Engels’s controversial philosophy of science and the early Frankfurt School’s influential account of positivism, outlining how the tradition of critical theory can move beyond its deep pessimism about technoscientific practice—without forfeiting the historical insight such pessimism once animated.
Rifle Theory: Engels and the History of Technology
Political Theory, online advance publication, forthcoming in print
A reading of Friedrich Engels’s forgotten “History of the Rifle” (1861), reconstructing his account of technological change as a social process and reflecting on the political significance of his non-deterministic materialism. (An indirect sequel to “Engels after Frankfurt.”)
Silence is violence, and so is speech
New Political Science, vol. 44, no. 1, 2022
A synoptic interpretation of contemporary impasses in the cultural politics of language, arguing that we cannot resolve debates about “linguistic violence” simply through conceptual analysis or intellectual history but must instead reexamine how language itself is being transformed by more fundamental kinds of social, political, and technological change.
Quaker Nonviolence in Apartheid Cape Town, 1976–1990
European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 19, no. 4, 2020
An article, based on archival research, about how white Quakers in apartheid-era Cape Town struggled with the meaning of their theological-political pacifism amid the systemic injustice of their society.
The Utopian Shadow of Normative Reconstruction
Constellations, vol. 25, no. 3, 2018
An article about gender studies and the Frankfurt School, examining how a particular way of thinking about freedom and social reproduction can help us theorize the concretely utopian dimensions of intimacy and relationality.
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Selected writing in interdisciplinary journals and in public-facing outlets
The Crisis of Language
Free Speech Battles series, spring 2021 — Short essay examining why debates about the politics of language, caught between competing frameworks of “speech and harm” and “discourse and power,” are today so apparently confused. Published in conjunction with a public lecture on language and violence (and technology).
Surveillance as Infrastructure
The Site Magazine, summer 2020 — Brief contribution to a larger magazine symposium on technology, the built environment, and culture amid the pandemic.
A Rumble in the Taupe Hum of Info-Capital – with Matthew Claudel
Journal of Design and Science, 2019 — A coauthored essay critiquing the Silicon Valley obsession with the Singularity as a symptom of the neoliberal project of “informational capitalism” in urban and digital space.
The Queerness of Distraction
Theology and Sexuality, 2014 — An essay on the implications for queer theory and religious studies of ways of thinking about time and subjectivity that start from discontinuity rather than coherence. Selected by the journal as an “Editor’s Choice” article for 2014.
matt shafer 