SSE Researcher Jonjo Brady wins Outstanding Thesis Award from Ulster University

12 June 2026

Jonjo Brady, post-doctoral researcher at SSE’s Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations (SPIR), has been awarded the ‘Outstanding Thesis Award’ for Arts, Humanities and Social Services Faculty at Ulster University for his work entitled ‘The exhaustion of possibility in contemporary capitalism: Dramatization of the Wearied’.

Jonjo’s winning work was chosen by a panel of academics and agreed by the Associate Dean of Research and Impact at Ulster University.

After completing his PhD at Ulster University, Jonjo joined SPIR in November 2024 as a post-doctorate research associate working with Dr Ben Turner on the project: ‘Life Beyond Work: Understanding Post-Work as a Tradition of Political Thought’.

Alongside his role supporting this project, Jonjo contributes to the research culture of the department by participating in Theorylab and Global Theory Forum and serving as the post-doctorate representative on the SPIR Research Committee. 

 ‘Life Beyond Work: Understanding Post-Work as a Tradition of Political Thought’ attempts to collate the disparate thinkers of post-work and contemporary work studies in order to see if we can think of them as having a distinct tradition.

Full Thesis Abstract:

This thesis is a dramatization, a practice not concerned with generating normative claims or a ‘new’ interpretive stance on claims already made, but with treating theory as a dramatic performance which brings concepts to life, intensifying them enough so that they engender dynamic affects and provocations. Dramatization understands that writing only ever happens from within the conditions of its own experience and so works from within the problematic perspective of a tired, yet optimistic, western conceptual persona to explore the concepts and experiences of tiredness and their relationship to culture, work and productivity within contemporary capitalism.

Beginning with fatigue’s nineteenth century emergence as a concept and concern for philosophers and factory owners alike, the thesis uses Karl Marx’s Capital to demonstrate how, despite the prevailing preoccupation with overcoming fatigue, productivity is only made material reality through its repeated expenditure and so is, by capitalist design, constitutive of fatigue. The thesis then traces this concept through to the twenty-first century, and – through the work of Franco Berardi, Mark Fisher, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze – shows how productivity is expanded within post-fordism to include all kinds of productive life not traditionally considered so, thus creating new conceptualisations and experiences of fatigue.

It considers fatigue derived from the productive mentality converging with entertainment and consumption, and fatigue felt from the accelerative proliferation of signs and signification more generally. The thesis also explores ways in which the west responds to fatigue by reducing complex problems and structural realities into simple and sensible narratives forming a circulation of clickbait affectivity – obfuscating meaningful engagement while alleviating fatigue. 

The later stages of the thesis contrast fatigue with exhaustion – an intensive Deleuzian posture nullifying any value in activity whatsoever – and speculates on the impossibility of achieving any wilful activity without rekindling this irreconcilable relationship between productivity and fatigue.