Mr Thomas Dekeyser

I am a cultural-digital geographer whose work examines digital technologies, negative affects, and the politics of refusal. More specifically, I examine how the politics of resistance shifts in relation to changing technological and urban conditions, and how, in turn, such negative politics push us to rethink geographical understandings of power, affect, and the human. My work, while grounded in cultural and digital geography, is inspired by critical theory and pessimist philosophies.

Before moving to the University of Southampton, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway, and a 150th Anniversary Research Fellow in Geography at Aberystwyth University. My BA and MA degrees were in Media Studies (Goldsmiths University) and in Geography (Royal Holloway), and I undertook my PhD in Geography at the University of Southampton. Before entering academia, I worked as an advertising strategist for Saatchi & Saatchi, a large advertising agency.

My work draws on Creative and GeoHumanities methods, with a focus on film. I have recently co-directed MACHINES IN FLAMES (2022; 49min), an experimental documentary about a group of French computer workers who bombed computer firms in the early 1980s, and BREACHED (2024; 15min), a diary chronicle of modern-day cargo looting.