Charles Stubblefield is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. His primary research focuses on the production of knowledge within the contemporary world, looking at the ways that knowledge production is related to particular structures, social relations, and power. He draws on a diverse range of philosophical and theoretical perspectives, including phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. Specifically, he examines how the production of knowledges are constrained, provoked, and directed by the rise of digital technology and its relation to modern capitalism. However, as ecological destruction becomes increasingly pervasive and prominent, he has expanded his research to concurrently examine the contested term of the “Anthropocene.” Here he examines the barriers and capacities for human thought to respond to ecological crises and the ways in which our thought and ability to respond to ecological crises are constrained by social institutions, power, discourses, and social relations more generally. The goal of this research is to challenge those constraints and to expand our ability to think of more egalitarian and less destructive social and human-nature relations.
