James Stockman

Bio

I am a critical digital media theorist whose research explores the cognitive, epistemic, medium-specific, and political-economic transformations driven by advances in computation and digital media. Situated at the intersection of critical theory and digital media studies, my research is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on critical social theory, software and critical AI studies, the philosophy of science and technology, continental philosophy, media history, cultural theory, platform studies, and digital methods.

I was awarded an AHRC-funded PhD in Digital Media from the University of Sussex in 2024. My thesis drew on a corpus of interviews with network scientists and critical media theorists to explore how network- and graph-based methods, metrics, and styles of thought have become integral to understanding, ordering, and structuring aspects of social life under conditions of computation, tracking the rise of network rationality from a position of relative obscurity on the peripheries of mainstream sociology into a dominant feature of scientific discourse and technoscientific practice within computational capitalism.

I am currently building on this research as a CIM Fellow at the University of Warwick, where I am developing a critical technical practice pilot titled Critical AI Sprints: Troubling Society as a Computable Object in Computational Social Science in collaboration with Michael Dieter. This project brings humanistic and computational approaches into dialogue to critically explore emerging developments in LLM-augmented social network modelling and simulation.

I have previously worked as an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, where I taught across modules on the sociology of technology, as well as critical race, postcolonial, and decolonial studies. I am also a Research Associate at the University of Sussex, where my research focusses on the topic of critical theory and LLMs. My first book, Critical Theory and Network Science: Reason in Computational Capitalism, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press

Critical AI Sprints: Troubling Society as a Computable Object in Computational Social Science

Computational social science has recently begun incorporating the resource-intensive yet potentially powerful augmentative capacities of large language models, raising expectations of generating novel insights into human behaviour. This project focuses on LLM-based approaches to network simulation, which aim to construct synthetic networks of ‘generative agents’ that purportedly exhibit a broader range of human-like behaviour, thereby enabling practitioners to more effectively test social interventions prior to deployment. This shift not only registers the emergence of new regimes of ‘capture’ but also raises pressing questions about the implications of new forms of cognitive delegation and the need for appropriate domain-specific methods, with LLMs arguably threatening to reinforce broader processes of instrumentalisation.

In response, this project positions the mobilisation of LLMs within computational social science as a research site requiring both social scientific and computational investigation. Drawing on interviews with practitioners in the field, this project will take the form of an experimental critical technical practice pilot or ‘AI Sprint’, combining interpretive and critical frameworks with LLM-based methods to iteratively produce a critical thematic map and interactive visualisation of LLM-driven network simulation. Grounded in an account of prevailing practices and emerging patterns of deployment within computational capitalism, it seeks to analyse the epistemological thresholds underpinning this approach to the synthetic generation of social relations, with the aim to: (a) illuminate this methodology’s wider social implications; (b) model a way of mobilising social critique within an explicitly reflexive approach to LLM-augmented social research; and (c) provide a locus for interdisciplinary dialogue between computational and critical social scientists, demonstrating the role that critical theory might play in supporting greater reflexivity in a field that has historically privileged technical over sociotechnical understandings of the social.