Dr Benjamin Richards

Benjamin is an Assistant Professor in Employment Relations at Northumbria University. His background is in archaeology and material culture studies and his work continues to look to the past to understand the present. Benjamin’s PhD was on the organisation of postfasicst subcultural movements drawing on semiotics to investigate the relation between the ideational and material. His work as such remains focused on social change and social division as explored through the massifying effects of neoliberalism and the relationship to authoritarianism, conspiracy theory and the far-right. Benjamin’s work is theoretical and qualitative with an interest in social and material semiotics as well as other visual, archaeological and historical methods. Current projects include work on the anti-managerialism of Trumpism, pirate alternativity, occupational sub-cultures and alternative academic publishing. Benjamin is book review editor and a member of the editorial collective of ephemera: theory & politics in organization.