Dr Tom Campbell

Profile

I am Deputy Director (Education) at the Leeds Institute for Societal Futures and Assoicate Professor of Social Theory in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. My work spans social and political thought, disability studies, and the history of social theory, with particular interests in modernity, biopolitics, exclusion, and the history and political imagination of the disabled people’s movement.

My work is shaped especially by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Zygmunt Bauman. Across my research, I examine how modern societies classify, govern and pathologise human difference, and how those orders are challenged through resistance, social movements and oppositional forms of thought. Disability, neurodiversity, and the history of impairment categories have been central sites through which I have pursued these questions, alongside a sustained interest in the intellectual and political traditions of the disabled people’s movement. My wider concern is with the organisation of social life in modernity and the changing relationship between power, difference and resistance.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Sociology, my MA in Social Research, and my doctoral research at the University of Leeds. From 2018 to 2023, I served as the School’s Director of Student Education in the School of Sociology and Social Policy.

Responsibilities

• Deputy Director (Education) Leeds Institute for Societal Futures

Research interests

My research sits at the intersection of social and political thought, disability studies, and historical sociology. I investigate the biopolitics of disablement. Central to this is the genealogy of impairment categories: how bodily, cognitive and social differences come to be classified, governed and pathologised within different formations of modernity.

My first monograph, Dyslexia: The Government of Reading (2013), investigated the formation of reading difficulty as a specific individual category in relation to the advent of mass literacy. Since then, my work has expanded into a broader analysis of disablement, classification and the social ordering of human difference.

I am also interested in the resistance practices of disabled people, and in the political and intellectual history of the UK disabled people’s movement. This strand of work, including collaborative research on disability politics and social movements, has led to ongoing archival and conceptual research on UPIAS, the social model of disability, and the wider history of disability politics, including current collaboration with Professor Hannah Morgan.

A major strand of my recent research brings disability studies into dialogue with social theory, especially through engagement with Zygmunt Bauman’s account of solid and liquid modernity. My monograph Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence: From Solid to Liquid Modernity examines how disablement is reconfigured across changing social forms and uses disability as a vantage point from which to analyse ambivalence, exclusion and the unstable norms of late modern life.

I am currently investigating the impact of the wider deployment of AI on the biopolitics of both disability and neurodiversity. This work explores how emerging technologies may reshape inclusion and exclusion, the value attached to different forms of cognition and embodiment, and the future of work, access and human distinction.

Since 2018, I have also collaborated with Professor Mark Davis, Dr Jack Palmer and Dr Dariusz Brzezinski on the unpublished papers of Zygmunt Bauman. This work has involved helping to establish and develop the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Archive at the University of Leeds, in collaboration with the Brotherton Library Special Collections team. Together we have edited three volumes of Bauman’s selected writings — Culture and Art, History and Politics and Theory and Society,y — and contributed to the development of a living-bibliographyy of his work.

I am also working on the concept of non-fascist living that Foucault develops in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

Student education

My educational leadership brings together disciplinary depth in sociology with interdisciplinary, challenge-led curriculum development. Through my role at the Leeds Institute for Societal Futures, I contribute to the development of new forms of postgraduate education oriented to major societal challenges, including cross-faculty and co-produced provision in areas such as AI, ethics and society.

I am broadly interested in higher education pedagogy, especially curriculum design, inclusive practice, quality assurance, object-based learning, the use of archives and collections in teaching, and synoptic and challenge-led assessment.

Within the School, I convene Sociology of Objects, a third-year undergraduate module exploring the role of objects and other non-human actors in social life. The module uses object-based learning through practical sessions in the University of Leeds Special Collections and has been developed in collaboration with Angela Newton in the librarys learning development team. It engages with adjacent fields including anthropology, archaeology, and museum studies, while introducing students to the pedagogic and analytical possibilities of working directly with archival and material collections.

I also convene Understanding Disability on the online MSc Disability Studies, Rights and Inclusion. This module examines the major ideas of the Disabled People’s Movement and their significance for disability studies and contemporary social thought.

In previous years, I have taught across the history of sociology, classical and contemporary social theory, and disability studies. I also developed and convened State of Emergency: Social Science and the COVID-19 Pandemic, a cross-faculty module addressing the social, political and regulatory dimensions of the pandemic.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Disability Studies
• Centre for Health, Technologies and Social Practice

Current postgraduate researchers

• Jonathan Hume
• Rebecca Louise Porter
• Burgandi Rakoska
• Sarah Troke
• Yulyne Li