Dr Tom Campbell

Profile

I work mainly in the areas of Disability Studies, Social Theory and the History of Social Thought influenced primarily by Michel Foucault (in particular his writings of the early and mid nineteen-seventies), Giles Deleuze and Zygmunt Bauman. From 2018 to 2023, I was the School’s Director of Student Education, and I am currently the School’s Director of Postgraduate Studies. I completed my first degree in Sociology, my MA in Social Research and my doctoral research, a genealogy of dyslexia, all here at the University of Leeds.

Responsibilities

• Director Postgraduate Researcher

Research interests

I investigate the biopolitics of disablement. Central to this is the genealogy of impairment categories. In 2013, I published Dyslexia: the Government of Reading which investigated the formation of reading difficulty as a specific individual category in relation to the advent of mass literacy. I am also interested in the resistance practices of disabled people and have published on this with Professor Angharad Beckett and Professor Paul Bagguley. This has led me to an interest in the history of the UK disabled people movement on which I am currently collaborating with Dr Hannah Morgan. I am currently investigating the impact of wider deployment of AI (Artificial intelligence) on the biopolitics of both disability and neurodiversity.

Since 2018, I have been collaborating with Professor Mark Davis, Dr Jack Palmer (both of the University of Leeds) and Dr Dariusz Brzezinski (Philosophy and Sociology, the Polish Academy of Science) on the unpublished papers of Zygmunt Bauman. We have worked with the Special Collections Archive Team in the University’s Brotherton Library to establish and launch the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Archive, a public research archive of published and unpublished material authored by the Bauman family. We have complied and continue to work on a living bibliography of Zygmunt Bauman published in Thesis Eleven in 2020 and available on the Bauman Institute website living-bibliography. We have published three volumes collecting Zygmunt Bauman’s unpublished and lesser-known papers of Culture and Art, History and Politics and Theory and Society, all available from Polity press.

I am finalising a short monograph that uses Bauman’s account of solid and liquid modernity to theorise disablement. 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

I am interested in the practice of teaching and learning in the discipline of Sociology. More broadly within Higher Education, I am interested in issues such as quality assurance, inclusive practice, object-based learning, the use of archival collections in teaching  and synoptic assessment.

Within the School, I convene the Sociology of Objects, a third-year undergraduate module that considers the role of non-human actors such as objects in social life. The module deploys object-based learning through practical sessions in the University of Leeds’ Special Collections, as well as considering the different ways objects have been approached in the history of social thought. The module engages with adjacent disciplines such as Anthropology, Archaeology, and Art Gallery and Museum Studies.

I also convene Understanding Disability, a module in our online MSc Disability Studies, Rights and Inclusion. The module considers how the big ideas of the disabled people’s movement have transformed lives and have set the intellectual culture of disability studies.

In previous years, I taught a variety of courses on 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 responding to the social, political and regulatory elements of the COVID-19 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