Writing
The follow are some examples of my work including short stories, essays and dissertation.
Pandamonium
(As featured on BBC Radio Ulster Storytellers)
"When the Pandas started building cities, no one was surprised. You’d think that we would have been, you know, as a species, but after the amount of time and attention devoted to them in the annuls of popular culture, we all seemed to think that, well, to be honest with you, it was about bloody time.
Spent too long suckling on the teet of human ingenuity, that’s what I say. With all the breeding programs, the feeding programs and all the other ‘how in the hell are we supposed to get these animals to mate’ programs, it seemed only good and proper that they started taking care of themselves. But no one was shocked when they did so. Not even me, to tell you the truth.
CNN treated it as a side show. Fox treated it as a national security crisis, because of course. And BBC One cobbled together an episode of Panorama that focused mainly on the ethicality of their bamboo consumption. But no one was surprised..."
Dissertation
Abstract
The Alt-Right are a white nationalist movement, primarily organised online, whose existence exemplifies the re-emergence of racist and authoritarian ideals in the United States. They are responsible for the dissemination of an ideology which, in recent years, has radicalised individuals across the globe into committing acts of terror; the Christchurch massacre being the most recent. However, existing literature often fails to distinguish this movement from its related counterpart; the Alt-Light, whose ideology is similar, yet departs from that of the Alt-Right at critical junctures. As such, the following dissertation aims to uncover the identity formation of the Alt-Right and Alt-Light, understood as two separate but related movements. To do so, discourse analysis, drawn from the works of Laclau and Mouffe, is performed on four speeches from four separate individuals who are understood to be proponents of either the Alt-Right or Alt-Light. The following research finds that, while their identities are related, they are constructed in distinctly different manners.
The Ferrier (Prologue)
(As read at the Books Beyond Boundaries NI Showcase)
"Matso Kilner, first casualty of the Stratford Incident, spent the last two years of his life tucked away within a hollow of London’s Sea Wall; three stories up and still beneath low tide. He liked it that way, once he’d gotten used to the smell. It wasn’t a glamourous life, and he didn’t pretend that it was, but he never regretted the decision to move in; the first in his life that he didn’t.
He knew that other maintenance hatches along this stretch of wall were also secretly inhabited but none, he thought, could be as homely as his. He had even fashioned some strips of amber plastic into a lampshade, which bathed the hatch’s dull metal in a warm, if not cosy, glow. Matso knew it didn’t amount to much, but it was the only place to ever feel like home. And, most importantly, he would never run out of drinking water...."
