Thomas Keating is a Researcher in Technology and Social Change at the Department of Thematic Studies: Tema T, Linköping University.
“My research lies in Human Geography and engages with problems involving human-technology relationships. Here I pursue three main areas:
- Nuclear Memory Communication: my current research project focuses on writing a Key Information File (KIF) for geological repositories for nuclear waste. A KIF is a document that describes the Swedish nuclear waste repositories in an intelligible way to those without specialised knowledge of nuclear technology and radioactivity. It forms one part of a larger international strategy of transferring information to future generations (circa 10,000-100,000 years) about ‘permanent’ repositories for nuclear waste.
- Speculative Thinking: My research also advances forms of speculative thinking via recent innovations in continental philosophy (Stengers, Debaise, Deleuze, Latour etc.) with geographical research attempting to expand what counts as the empirical field (non-representational theory, new materialism, affect, post-humanism etc.). I am especially concerned with how speculative thinking forms an approach to experimenting with the production of abstractions.
- Technologies: Advancing debates in human geography, my research also develops an ontogenetic reading of technology following the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. Key here is the sense that the concept technology is something defined less as a component of human being, and much more as set of nonhuman concretising processes defined by specific technological logics that are irreducible to organic evolution”.
Selected publications
Keating, T. P. (2024). Techno-genesis: Reconceptualising geography’s technology from ontology to ontogenesis. Progress in Human Geography, 48(1), 49-65.
Keating, T. P., & Storm, A. (2023). Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative. Progress in Environmental Geography, 2(1-2), 97-117.
Williams, N., & Keating, T. (Eds.). (2022). Speculative geographies: ethics, technologies, aesthetics. Springer Nature.