Dr Lewis Bloodworth

I joined Kingston University in 2022 and am currently a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Criminology. Alongside my teaching and research, I have been extensively involved in course leadership and outreach. I currently lead Exploring Crime and Deviance and also teach on Crime, Media and Culture and the postgraduate Theorising Crime module.

Before joining Kingston, I taught at the University of Kent, where I completed my PhD in Political and Social Thought. My thesis, Love’s Political Potential: Critical Reflections from a Deleuzian Perspective, used the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to examine the politics of desire, subjectivity and intimate life. My research remains theoretically interdisciplinary, drawing particularly on continental philosophy, critical theory, Marxism and post-Marxism, and the sociology of intimacy.

My current research examines transformations in love, intimacy and gender under contemporary social and technological conditions. One strand of this work focuses on dating apps and the changing organisation of romantic encounters. I am particularly interested in algorithmic seriality and the ways digital platforms reshape how people encounter, evaluate and imagine relationships with others. This work considers how intimate choice is increasingly mediated by platform technologies and how these technologies intersect with wider transformations in identity, subjectivity and sexual culture.

A related strand examines secrecy, transparency and intimacy. Here, I am interested in the historical and gendered organisation of disclosure, privacy and unknowability within intimate relationships. Rather than assuming that greater transparency necessarily produces more equal or authentic relationships, this research considers how different expectations around secrecy and openness structure intimacy, recognition and power.

More recently, my research has turned towards misogyny, the manosphere and platform capitalism. I am particularly interested in networked misogyny: the ways misogynistic ideas, actors and communities become connected across digital platforms, and how these networks intersect with attention economies, creator cultures and changing sexual markets. This work examines misogyny not simply as a set of beliefs or attitudes, but as something shaped by platform infrastructures, visibility, monetisation and wider relations of political economy.

Across these areas, I am interested in the relationship between intimate life and broader processes of commodification, inequality and social change. My research asks how love, sexuality and gender are reorganised through digital technologies, and how increasingly platform-mediated forms of social interaction reshape experiences of desire, recognition, resentment and belonging.

I have disseminated this research nationally and internationally, presenting work on love, intimacy, dating technologies, sexual economies and misogyny at conferences and research events in the UK and across Europe. This has included presentations at the Political Studies Association, the Deleuze and Guattari Studies conference in Belgrade, Historical Materialism in Istanbul, and, most recently, research presented in Oxford.

Across these projects, my central concern is with the relationship between desire, power and social organisation: how apparently personal and intimate experiences are shaped by wider transformations in culture, technology and political economy.

• PhD, University of Kent, Political and Social Thought
• MA, University of Kent, International Conflict Analysis
• BSc, Canterbury Christ Church University, Politics and Global Governance