Dr. Peter Chambers
Senior Lecturer
Details
Department: School of GUSS
Campus: City Campus Australia
peter.chambers@rmit.edu.au
ORCID: 0000-0002-8852-1630
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
Pete asks: how do we live our lives, together, now? He writes about global anxiety and institutional involution, drawing on social theory to try and make sense of the surreal, stupid and destructive aspects of the world we're struggling to live in now. Pete is writing for a sense of hope and agency, against incoherence, confusion, destruction and nihilism. His book in progress examines the piped society: vast, invisible systems moving consumption around the world, and what our dependence on them is doing to our lives and our heads. In the 2010s, Pete's scholarly work focused on the emergence of border security, as well as sovereignty, securitisation, offshore, disruption, and logistics. Early 2020s work returned to and built on insights from classical sociology and the first generation of critical theory: in critical and theoretical criminology, this was about incels and humiliation; in social theory, it focused on anxiety and conspiracy theories. At RMIT, his own teaching work is interdisciplinary, and strives for open thinking on global crime and terrorism and society. He also teaches in to the criminology and justice program in a number of subjects. He co-hosts Imperfect World with Chris Hobson, https://imperfectnotes.substack.com/podcastand blogs at livingtogethersomehow.substack.com.
Academic positions
- Senior lecturer
- RMIT University
- Criminology and Justice
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2018 – Present
- Lecturer
- Deakin University
- Criminology
- Australia
- 2015 – 2017
- Part-time lecturer
- RMIT University
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2014 – 2014
- Sessional lecturer
- RMIT University
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2012 – 2013
- Sessional tutor
- University of Melbourne
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2007 – 2014
- Sessional lecturer
- University of Melbourne
- Melbourne, Australia
- 2007 – 2014
Teaching interests
Pete teaches Global Crime and Terrorism and Society at RMIT Melbourne, where he is senior lecturer in Criminology and Justice.
Research interests
Pete's current fields of interest are broader and are bridging between sociological and psychosocial points of focus: containerisation and containment, separation and anxiety, drive and disintegration, control and uncontrollability, love and hate, power and ressentiment. Most of Pete's fields of interests are about the primacy of distribution and circulation in its unevenness, which is just a way of trying to think about how we actually live now – usually in ways we avoid noticing. This can be parsed from William Gibson's observation: the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
