I research the cultural industries, the political economy of media, financial capital, and media authorship. I am the author of Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (UC Press, 2024; available open-access) and the co-author of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: indie sex, corporate lies, and digital videotape (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2013). I am also the co-founder of The Cultural Capital Project, a SSHRC-funded research project that studies independent music in the streaming age, as well as the Media And Consolidation Research Organization (MACRO) Lab, which analyzes the effects of monopoly ownership on media. 

Broadly defined, my research analyzes the relationship between culture and commerce, focusing on media systems, the social processes that shape them (capitalism, financialization, racialization, digitalization), and the roles of agents within them (institutions, corporations, workers, authors, and artists). My primary methodology for this work is the critical political economy of media tradition, though I am influenced by media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, heterodox economics, and the digital humanities. The media forms I concentrate on are film, television, and popular music, and I am motivated by questions such as: How do wealth, finance, ownership, and power affect our media industries and the cultural objects produced by them? How are social inequities shaped and perpetuated through media? How do artists and workers create within capitalist constraints? What policies and alternatives could be crafted to promote a more diverse, radical, thoughtful media system?

My latest book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture.  Moreover, financialization is transforming our media texts into marketplaces of branded transactions. Derivative Media is an empirical project, using data visualizations to demonstrate the degree to which our media systems are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.

In a previous life, my work experience includes sweeping paint dust off my dad’s welding shop floor, before being promoted to forklift driver (demoted after one day); sweeping popcorn off the floor of a video store, for which I was paid with five (5) VHS rentals per week, before being promoted to cashier, for which I was paid minimum wage and told to stop putting Tommy Boy on so often; packing flower pots into boxes on the midnight shift at a sweltering plastics factory, before being promoted to sweeping and mopping the floor (demoted after 4 weeks of spreading the grease around rather than cleaning it); projecting film at the school theater (demoted to popcorn stand and floor sweeper after spilling hundreds of feet of film and ruining a print); and various other non-sweeping related jobs such as edtech at Western University, digital literacy at UBC, educational outreach for Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, and consulting for UBC’s Museum of Anthropology.