Billy Antony Austen Mark Surr
- Title
- Location
- Role
- PhD in Philosophy
- b.surr@keele.ac.uk
Biography
I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Having completed my MA dissertation on the distinction Hannah Arendt draws between the concepts of violence and power, I decided to pursue a research degree at Keele University researching the reconceptualisation of power itself in Hannah Arendt's work.
Research and scholarship
The working title of my research project is 'Beyond Hannah Arendt’s Reconceptualisation of Power: Towards a Solution of the Normative-Descriptive Problem in Political Philosophy' and its main objective is to examine whether Arendt’s understanding of power, as 'action in concert' between people in the public realm, can be understood normatively as a way of discussing how political power should operate, or descriptively as a discussion of the way political power actually operates. This will situate Arendt within a wider debate between normative and descriptive political theories and will, in turn, point to ways in which we can utilise Arendt’s work to change how we perceive power contemporaneously.
Publications
NWCDTP AHRC Funded Studentship, 'Arendt Against the Tradition: ‘Power Over’ and ‘Power With’' Upcoming UnderConstruction Journal Article