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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Richard Stopford

Assistant Professor (Education)

Affiliations
Affiliation
Assistant Professor (Education) in the Department of Philosophy

Biography

Departmental Roles

Admin Roles, 2025/26:

Deputy Directory of Undergraduate Studies

Tutor Manager

Harassment officer

Research Interests and Biography

Overview

I primarily work in philosophy of education (especially critical pedagogy), and aesthetics. I draw on diverse traditions as diverse as critical theory, contemporary analytic metaphysics, phenomenology, poststructuralism.

AOS: Critical Pedagogy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Critical Theory (esp. Adorno); Metaphysics; Poststructuralism; German idealism (Esp. Kant and Hegel); Feminist philosophy.

AOC: Psychonalayis; Existentialism; Political Theory; Philosophy of language; post-colonial theory.

Background

My PhD and early work focused on the aesthetics and philosophy of Adorno. I have since published on his theory of aesthetic autonomy, have work on his critical metaphysics, and am developing intersections between his aesthetics and eeriness. His influence pervades all of my philosophical thinking: that the socio-political historical domains mediate the very being of subjects and objects generally; his critical understanding of non-identity and its politics is crucial to any philosophical inquiry.

Critical Pedagogy:

My current scholarship revolves around critical pedagogy in the philosophy of education. I am very interested in how education, and the classroom more specifically, is configured according to socio-political, cultural and historical sources. I am particularly interested in how the classroom presupposes a variety of existential, epistemological and metaphysical frames in order to operate. Furthermore, that those frames translate into epistemic limits. Appreciation of these limits is crucial when teaching and learning involves the transgression of those limits.

I have already published a number of papers on these themes, bringing Wittgenstein, feminist, and decolonial theory to bear on the limits of educational possibility. I am extending this research by thinking through the role of atmosphere in the classroom. Atmosphere is receiving a lot of attention in phenomenology but it has yet to be thought through in the context of the classroom. Indeed, atmosphere is largely considered to be an extra-pedagogical feature of the classroom. I want to press the importance of atmopshere as fundamental to the possibility of learning. I am also interested to think through the pedagogical import of kinds of atmosphere, especially discomfort. To that end I'm working through the links between work on atmosphere and literature on the 'pedagogy of discomfort'.

I have a broad portfolio of teaching as a result of my diverse scholarly interests which span both the continental and analytic traditions. I have taught Aesthetics, German Idealism, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Language, Logic, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Feminism and Political Philosophy amongst others.

Strangeness:

Strangeness is my main topic of aesthetic interest at the moment. Strangeness, as I am calling it, refers to a broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences in which we feel disturbed in some way or other. How and to what effect we will be disturbed is much to do with the particular modality of strangeness in question. Some forms of strangeness have a rich pedigree of historical engagement: Kant and Burke's theories of the sublime; Freud's Unheimlich; Kristeva's abjection, to name a few.

However, other aspects of strangeness have either been subsumed under these categories, especially uncanniness, or simply neglected. Inspired by Mark Fisher's work on weirdness and eeriness, I have been developing novel accounts of these phenomena, and am looking to extend these treatments into the domains of creepiness and spookiness. Whilst these are clearly related, and often covary, I argue that they are nevertheless distinct in their phenomenology, their object triggers, their affective profile, and their socio-political, historical and existential import, i.e., in terms of how they help contribute to the meaningfulness of lived life. I have two papers on eeriness, one on creepiness and eeriness (see Adorno above) in progress, all of which will be geared towards a monograph on strangeness.

Following themes arising out of Adorno's aesthetics, I am interested in the ontology of artworks, albeit from a critical point of view. To that end, I have papers on the metaphysics of statues as it informs restoration work, and also decolonial activism. I am also interested in the socio-cultural formation of aesthetic subjects, refracted through the lens of postcolonial theory. In that regard I have worked on cultural appropriation, and how subjects and objects as such configure the dialectics of appreication and appropriation within hegemonic contexts.

Finally, again arising out of themes in Adorno's aesthetics, I have worked on the philosophy of film music. I'm fairly nuts about music and films so this was a natural fit for me. I have a folder full of ideas for papers on film and music that I will write at some point!

 

Research interests

  • Critical Pedagogy, Aesthetics, Adorno, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Education, Critical Pedagogy, Post-Kantian Philosophy, Contemporary Metaphysics,

Publications

Chapter in book

Journal Article

Supervision students

Matthew Robson

Mike Mitchell

Summer School Academic (Casual)