Born in South Wales (UK), I am a Welsh writer, editor and communications professional based in London.
I have written about queer ontology and temporality, delta epistemologies and the affective currency of memes. More recently, I've been working on a collection of essays on refusal as a black artistic and political strategy that moves against and beneath what Lilian G. Mengesha and Lakshmi Padmanabhan call the “vicious dialectic of assimilation and resistance” to create alternative spaces of political action and thus modes of survival in racial capitalism ("Introduction: Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform", 3).
My academic background is in aesthetics, literature, and critical theory. I studied for an MA in Comparative Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (2021-2023) and have a first class honours degree in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh (2016-2020), with two years of art history. I am interested in ways of living that resist and disrupt totalising narratives and move beyond the knowable to imagine alternative spaces for life and thought, what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten might call “the undercommons” or the act of ‘undercommoning’ (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 8).
I recently completed an internship as a Communications Assistant at W139, a leading contemporary art gallery and production space in the centre of Amsterdam. Occupying a monumental building that was squatted by a group of artists in the 1970s, the gallery has carried on this activist legacy by remaining an artist-led organisation that prioritises experimentation, autonomy and, above all, collectivity. You can see examples of my communications and marketing work here.
I have also been a board member and editor of Soapbox, a graduate-led, peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis published online and in print. Soapbox promotes scholarly, artistic and interdisciplinary work that provocatively engages with cultural artefacts, concepts and contemporary phenomena within the humanities and is part of the Radical Open Access Collective. My editorial can be found here.
To collaborate, discuss ideas or commission me to write something, please email me at kirstymcintosh@outlook.com.
My pronouns are she/her.