Erin K Stapleton

I’m a researcher interested in destruction, archival imperfection, material volatility, resistance and ambiguity in digital and visual cultures, identity and media. My current project, Catastrophic Loss, investigates how colonial logics continue to inform everyday digital media cultures and practices, the fragility of these systems, and the losses they threaten and produce.

My first book, The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy of Expenditure After Georges Bataille was published in 2022 by Amsterdam University Press, and is available here. In it, I take destruction as the founding operation of culture and trace it through philosophy, the media of September 11 and disaster films, end-of-the-world narratives, execution and eroticism, before addressing the effects of the displacement of linear destruction on the culture and media produced in digital systems. In other words, it’s got sex, death, explosions… and computers. And an unexpected amount of Walter Benjamin for some reason. And a joke that will only be funny to people who are intimately familiar with Australian slang and Georges Bataille. I hope both of those people enjoy it. 

I completed my PhD with the London Graduate School at Kingston University, London in 2014, and my other qualifications at the University of Melbourne. I am currently a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Canberra.