Welcome.

I'm Kārlis! You might know me from the hit radio show Towards Thee I Roll, where I talk to my friends about Moby Dick for a couple of hours every once in a while. Or we might just be friends (though I expect the two groups share a sizeable overlap).

I’m setting this up now not because I have some grand idea for what my Substack could look like but because I feel the need to reactivate some of my creative and academic muscle.

My Background

I spent my undergraduate years studying International Relations, where I quickly learned to veer away from the institutional mindset that such programmes often foster, towards a more critical and a more ‘personal’ form of studying IR. I discovered I was a Big Foucault Guy and that, for better or for worse, came to define the way I think about the world, even if I eventually left Foucault himself behind. I also wrote a thesis about post-9/11 United States foreign policy as defined by a search for ontological security.

Derrida circled through that thinking, particularly in defining the wake of September 11 as a state of aporia where meaning disintegrated and could then be redefined by the neo-cons of the era. I thought a lot about language and discourse, and how the world is constructed by it, in this mish-mash of not-quite post-structuralism nor constructivism; a secret third thing maybe.

In my masters’ in International Conflict Studies, I turned more to (relational) sociology and injected culture into my thinking, eventually arguing for a recognition of science fiction as a form of political theorising, in response to rising allegorical usage of sci-fi in political science that tries to inject reality into the unreal and dismissing the cultural and political impact of such works. I wrote about mechs as constructive – of political reality, bodies at war, and inhabited space.

I even brought some of this thinking to another radio show called Powerful Friends, a Destiny 2 lore podcast.