Born in South Wales (UK), I am a writer, editor and communications professional based in London.
I have written about queer ontology and temporality, delta epistemologies and the affective currency of memes. More recently, I've been working on a collection of essays on refusal as a black artistic and political strategy that moves against and beneath what Lilian G. Mengesha and Lakshmi Padmanabhan call the “vicious dialectic of assimilation and resistance” to create alternative spaces of political action and thus modes of survival in racial capitalism ("Introduction: Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform", 3).
My academic background is in aesthetics, literature, and critical theory. I studied for an MA in Comparative Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (2021-2023) and have a first class honours degree in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh (2016-2020), with two years of art history. I am interested in ways of living that resist and disrupt totalising narratives and move beyond the knowable to imagine alternative spaces for life and thought, what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten might call “the undercommons” or the act of ‘undercommoning’ (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 8).
I have been a board member and editor of Soapbox, a graduate-led, peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis published online and in print. Soapbox promotes scholarly, artistic and interdisciplinary work that provocatively engages with cultural artefacts, concepts and contemporary phenomena within the humanities and is part of the Radical Open Access Collective.
To collaborate, discuss ideas or commission me to write something, please email me at kirstymcintosh@outlook.com.
My pronouns are she/her.