Instructor: Emma Stamm, PhD
Format: Archived 4-week seminar (Zoom sessions)
Total Runtime: ~9 hours
Original Dates: January 6th – January 27th, 2026

This seminar explores the unfinished project of acid communism as articulated by Mark Fisher, situating it within contemporary debates around media, technology, politics, and collective desire. Taking Fisher’s late work as a point of departure, the course asks how aesthetic experience once functioned as a catalyst for political imagination—and how that capacity has been systematically neutralized under capitalist realism.

Across four sessions, participants examine the relationship between culture and politics through case studies drawn from digital media, artificial intelligence, weird fiction, music, and popular culture. Particular attention is paid to nostalgia as a volatile affective force entangled with grief, war, race, gender, technology, and empire. While nostalgia frequently fuels reactionary politics, the seminar also considers how it might operate as a site of resistance, recovery, and speculative reimagining. What futures become possible when we interrogate the pasts we cling to?

Blending historical context with close theoretical reading, the course draws on Fisher’s writings alongside thinkers such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Bernard Stiegler, Byung-Chul Han, and Joshua Ramey. Key themes include weirdness and eeriness as affective registers, the political implications of algorithmic culture and AI, the role of psychedelic experience in consciousness-raising, and the possibility of “group consciousness” beyond individualized subjectivity.

Originally held live via Zoom, this archived edition includes full recordings of all four sessions and is designed for independent study. The course is well suited for participants interested in critical theory, cultural studies, media theory, contemporary philosophy, and the political stakes of aesthetics in the twenty-first century.

Instructor’s Biography 

Emma Stamm is a writer and scholar specializing in critical theory and science and technology studies. In addition to her academic publications, her writing has appeared in Real Life Mag, Vice Motherboard, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, and more. She has held teaching appointments at SUNY Farmingdale, Villanova University, New York University, and Virginia Tech. Her website is www.emmastamm.com. 

Syllabus: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1boDji4r2OToJI5wHzC4jgPouhH6hGqob/view?usp=sharing

Week 1 readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tNlW6nZRTYHf_Tiokiw6-GLKMoyQwAP6?usp=sharing

Week 2 readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13Yb3pO-ZgNWaVklG8Wsk2LXjGKZQbeMy?usp=sharing

Week 3 readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PYzVeELzdTJoWSyJYpxoMRdK8-uKnP8j?usp=sharing

Week 4 readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YvMisq-hWJlFuuCSYZKsHzrzz_l0ZJeC?usp=sharing