Dr Conor Heaney

Qualifications: BA (Hons), PGDL, MPhil, PhD

Dr Conor Heaney is an interdisciplinary researcher with a BA (Hons) in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Queen’s University Belfast, a Postgraduate Diploma in Law from BPP University, an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Warwick, and a PhD in Social & Political Thought from the University of Kent, Canterbury. Prior to joining Kent Law School, he held posts as a Lecturer in Liberal Arts & Politics Education at King’s College London, as well as a Lecturer in Legal Theory / Law & Society at the University of Strathclyde.

He has particular research interests in legal and political theory, Continental Philosophy, educational theory and policy, as well as philosophies of ecology, process, technology, and time. In particular, he has focused on the work of thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre. His research in recent years has been devoted to developing new methodological and ontological contributions to the field of “rhythmanalysis” as an area with largely untapped transdisciplinary potential to generate insight across philosophy, sociology, politics, law, science and technology studies, as well as in collaborative conversation with the natural sciences. In this vein, his first monograph was recently published with Routledge in 2022, entitled Rhythm: New Trajectories in Law.

Conor is also interested in collaborative and creative methods and their potential for experimenting with social forms and relations. Together with Dr Hollie Mackenzie, for example, he is one half of the Learning, Exchange, and Play (LEP) project, which has generated (to-date) three workplayshops, collaborative academic and non-academic writings, as well as (with Ben Cook) two short-films (LEP I and LEP II), with a third one forthcoming.

His current position at Kent Law School is as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate within Dr Connal Parsley’s UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Project entitled “The Future of Good Decisions: An Evolutionary Approach to Human-AI Government Administrative Decision-Making.”

Conor has worked on a variety of areas relevant to the themes and thinkers indicated above, including (but not limited to): political and legal theory, Continental philosophy, rhythmanalysis and the concept of rhythm in the history of philosophy more generally, philosophy and politics of technology, philosophy and politics of time, critical university studies, critical and experimental pedagogy (including educational theory), and aesthetics.