About
Who am I? What is this site? Why does meaning refuse to stay put? These are, on the surface, very simple questions. Except, of course, that they aren’t.
About Semiotic Drift
Culture | Theory | The Spaces in Between | And Also, Inevitably, the Anxiety of Meaning Itself
There’s a thing that happens when you try to explain what something is. A kind of recursive spiral, where the very act of definition forces you to acknowledge how unstable definitions actually are. (See also: Derrida, deconstruction, every half-understood reference to différance) Meaning doesn’t hold still. It shifts, flickers, and mutates in real-time, like a badly compressed image from the early days of the internet,[1] and yet, for reasons that are both practical and existential, we keep trying to pin it down. This brings us to Semiotic Drift—a site about media, culture, anxiety, theory, and the way meaning refuses to behave.
On a surface level (though we should be suspicious of surfaces, given how much postmodern thought is just a series of arguments about surfaces and depths and whether the distinction even holds up), this is a site about film, literature, art, and the ideas that circulate around them. But if that were all it was, you could just call it a blog and be done with it. What makes Semiotic Drift a little different—what makes it this site rather than just a site—is the particular way it thinks through the problem of meaning. It’s about nostalgia, but not in the Buzzfeed ‘Remember This?’ way, more in the Walter Benjamin sense of history as something that loops back on itself in ways we don’t fully understand until it’s too late. It’s about digital culture, but not in the ‘TikTok is rotting our brains’ sense, more in the McLuhan-adjacent way that asks whether the medium has already shaped us before we’ve even had time to think about it.
This project exists at the edges of things—theoretical and personal, structured and fragmented, academic and intuitive. Meaning is messy. Semiotic Drift is, among other things, an attempt to sit with that messiness without reducing it to a single neat argument.
About Me
Academic | Writer | Educator | Cultural Analyst | Professional Overthinker
So here’s the problem with bios: they demand coherence in a way that actual human lives refuse to provide. On paper, I am a writer, educator, and academic—born in South Africa, based in the UK, specialising in autofiction, autotheory, fragmented narratives, visual culture, and literary criticism. In practical terms, that means I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how stories work, how identity is constructed, and whether anything we write about ourselves is ever really true.
I’m interested in the tension between personal experience and critical theory, the ways in which memory and storytelling shape each other, and why certain narratives persist while others fade. My work often explores liminal spaces—where personal narratives dissolve into cultural critique, where theory becomes lived experience, and where traditional genres fail to hold the complexity of what they’re trying to contain. If that sounds abstract, it’s only because reality itself is.
Outside of writing, teaching, and research, I like cats, travel, walking, and tea, which is another way of saying I enjoy things that are quiet, liminal, and best appreciated in solitude. If you’re looking for a more formal version of all this, complete with professional achievements and a neatly structured portfolio, you can find that here. But if you’re here for the ideas—the ones that don’t fit neatly into CV bullet points—then welcome. Let’s get lost in the drift.
Think: early JPEGs where compression artefacts turned human faces into an uncanny mess of blurry edges and misplaced pixels. Which is, in its own way, a perfect metaphor for the way meaning degrades and reconfigures itself in digital culture. Also, arguably, a perfect metaphor for how identity functions under late capitalism. ↩︎
