Can a doctoral publication also be an artwork, accessible and enjoyable, yet rigorous as research? Let’s find out!

How to be a Medium? is a fully composed audio work while also acting as an academic dissertation. I wrote it for my own voice, to be acted by the actor that I am. It starts from the position of the actor as a medium of theatre to investigate how various techno-political arrangements entangle with and act on fleshly bodies, and how can we can still negotiate agency and room to wriggle.

The work consists of How (not) to be a puppet, an audio play tracing a trajectory in Western thought and theatre history in which actors (in their insidious hollowness and multiplicity!) are perpetually framed as problems to be solved, managed, or abolished altogether. This is juxtaposed with How to become a body, a through-composed meditation which explores cyborg becomings at the intersections of bodies and technologies, and how the unravelling of the individual sovereign body subject can also host practices of freedom and possibilities for self-transformation. How to artistic research offers an audio-book style introduction, which details the twists and turns of the research through which it came to be.

The whole thing is beautifully composed and sound designed by Rosie Swayne and comes out in September 2026! Yay!