Dr. Peter Chambers
Details
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College: School of GUSS
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Department: School of GUSS
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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peter.chambers@rmit.edu.au
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ORCID: 0000-0002-8852-1630
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
Pete's scholarly work responds to basic questions about the worlds we live in now, sits within traditions of critical and social theory, and emphasises the importance of norms and values, especially conflicting visions of justice and the good society. It asks: how are we to live our lives, together, somehow, now?
In the 2010s, Pete's scholarly work focused on the emergence of border security, as well as sovereignty, securitisation, offshore, disruption, and logistics. Early 2020s work returned to and built on insights from classical sociology and the first generation of critical theory: in critical and theoretical criminology, this was about incels and humiliation; in social theory, it focused on anxiety and conspiracy theories. From 2024, this strand will be further developed into essays looking at the psychopolitics of rage and sadness, and ressentiment.
Alongside this, Pete is returning to develop applied analyses of our troubles in living in cities together. This looks in detail at how ostensible transport solutions reveal rivalrous modes of urban existence (e-scooters platforms, disruption, surveillance capitalism), earlier examined in 2010s collaborations looking at urban objects (tacks, bollards, O Bike)
Pete co-hosts a podcast called Imperfect World, available via Apple, Spotify, and Podbean.
Academic positions
- Senior lecturer
- RMIT University
- Criminology and Justice
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2018 – Present
- Lecturer
- Deakin University
- Criminology
- , Australia
- 2015 – 2017
- Part-time lecturer
- RMIT University
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2014 – 2014
- Sessional lecturer
- RMIT University
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2012 – 2013
- Sessional tutor
- University of Melbourne
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2007 – 2014
- Sessional lecturer
- University of Melbourne
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2007 – 2014
Teaching interests
Research interests
Pete's current fields of interest are broader and are bridging between sociological and psychosocial points of focus: containerisation and containment, separation and anxiety, drive and disintegration, control and powerlessness, love and ressentiment. Most of Pete's fields of interests are about the primacy of distribution and circulation in its unevenness. This can be parsed from William Gibson's observation: the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
