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Robert F. Carley is an associate professor in the Department of International Affairs, a Melbern G. Glasscock Book Completion Fellow, 2026-7, and an inaugural Aggie Core Values Faculty Fellow, 2005-2006, in the University-wide honors program and minor. His research areas include cultural studies theories and methods, social movement studies, and ideology theory. A cultural theorist, Dr. Carley is interested in the relationship between the symbolic and organizational aspects of social movements and how these relationships shape and are shaped by conflict. He is currently working on three book projects. The first, under consideration with Temple University Press is Distortion Fields: Cultural Theory in the Interregnum. It offers an original approach to the relationship between cultural production, meaningful discourse, and political strategy during times of crisis. The second, The Post Neoliberal Turn: Gramsci, Classes, and Democratic Theory analyzes the relationship between social class, cultural production, social mobilization and democracy through the work of Antonio Gramsci and contemporary critical and democratic theory. The third, A Promise at the End of the World: Cultural Studies and Political Theory, edited with Pablo A. Castagno features scholarship from Italy, the UK, China, Taiwan, Chile, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, and Austria. Each contribution connects the political administration of economic, environmental, and social crises to the means through which specified cultural groups and the meaningful practices they participate in oppose, resist, comply with, or reinforce political power and social contradictions, affecting crises.
Dr. Carley is author and editor of eight books. His most recent are Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025) and The Cultural Production of Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). In addition, Dr. Carley published Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Culture & Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice. (State University of New York Press, 2019), and Autonomy, Refusal, and The Black Bloc: Positioning Class Analysis in Critical and Radical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019). He has recently published articles, book chapters, and review essays in A Handbook on Class and Culture (Intellect, forthcoming, 2026), Transformative Practice in Critical Media Literacy: Radical Democracy and Decolonized Pedagogy in Higher Education (Routledge 2024), Las Industrias Creativas: Tensiones en Estudios Culturales (published in Spanish by Teseo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2023), South Central Review, Postmodern Culture, Democratic Communiqué, The Journal of Class and Culture, Theory in Action, and The Sage Handbook of Critical Pedagogies.
Dr. Carley has been recognized by the Cultural Studies Association for his leadership and service (2023 recipient of The Outstanding Service and Leadership Award), the North Central Sociological Association for his scholarly contributions to social theory and social movement studies (2017 recipient of The Scholarly Achievement Award), and by the International Gramsci Society (at its fifth general assembly on 1 October 2021 in Cagliari, Italy) as a principal scholarly contributor to the field of North American Gramsci scholarship.
Dr. Carley joined the editorial boards of Howard Journal of Communication, Democratic Communiqué, Sociological Focus: Journal of The North Central Sociological Association, and DIO Press. He is an editor of Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Last, Dr. Carley served on the Governing Board of the Cultural Studies Association and was co-chair of The Union for Democratic Communications.
He is President and Acting Executive Director of the Cultural Studies Association.
See Social Movement Studies’ review of Dr. Carley’s most recent book, The Cultural Production of Social Movements.
