Assistant Professor
Ph.D University of California, Berkeley (2016)
My work is at the intersection of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and critical media studies. I conducted ethnographic research on different topics and in a wide range of contexts鈥攆rom spirit possession in a Buddhist monastery in Cambodia to couples therapy and clinical hypnosis in Argentina to digital media environments in North America. Whether I am writing about invisible spirits or patients in therapy or college students scrolling on TikTok, I am interested in describing the un/conscious practices that make and unmake psychic life.
My first book, (Duke University Press 2026), draws from affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology to address the psychosocial forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. Based on ethnographic observations of more than two hundred hours of systemic couples therapy in Buenos Aires, as well as autoethnographic recordings of my own sessions of hypnotherapy, the book asks how, and under which conditions, we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Written in an experimental and literary style, the book offers a choreography of short sections ranging from paragraphs to one-liners; the book鈥檚 fragments are animated by different voices鈥攖he academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens.
My current project investigates the phenomenological experience of binge-scrolling on social media platforms. I am now writing a book titled Dreams I Scroll Through: A Psycho-Phenomenology of TikTok, which is based on a multimodal research that uses affective computing, journaling, and eye tracking to analyze how college students (ages 19-24) engage with TikTok鈥檚 seemingly infinite feeds.
At the Scrolling Societies Lab (part of 涩里番鈥檚 Critical Media Lab) I鈥檝e developed an experimental setting that facilitates collective sessions of feed-analysis that bring research participants and researchers together in a form of free-associative image-work that engages with the participant鈥檚 recorded TikTok feeds. This approach considers the user鈥檚 feed as offering a form of extended dream-work that challenges boundaries between algorithmic and human unconscious. Moving away from technophobic critiques, I propose a phenomenological psycho-politics of the binge-scroll, understanding scrolling as an affective technology of presence that facilitates rapid oscillations across various attentional, affective, and un/conscious states.
I am currently developing a new research project about the transmission of affects in the context of bio-energetic Daoist practices in Montreal鈥攖he project is tentatively titled Force and Form: An Ethnography of Moving Stillness. Within the remaining fragments of writing time, I am also working on Bye Bye Now, a melancholically vitalist ethnographic novel that addresses experiences of loss, abandonment, and gendered violence across family archives.
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Representative Publications
Books
- Collu, Samuele. Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition. Durham & London: Duke University Press (2026). ()
听 - Collu, Samuele. Dreams I Scroll Through: A Phenomenology of TikTok (in preparation).
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Selected Writings
- Collu Samuele, Neal Lonergan, Lauren Frasca, Livia Ion, Elliot Durkee, Mina Mahdi, Zahara Mustin, Hadrien Velde, 鈥淣o Life, No Death, No End, No Nothing: Just Feed.鈥� Lo Squaderno. Explorations in Space and Society, no. 71, July 2025: 63-67. ()
听 - Collu, Samuele and Leo Stillinger. 鈥�Like Buzzing in My Brain: A Psychopolitical Phenomenology of TikTok.鈥� In N茅gociations affectives: exp茅riences sensibles, r茅flexivit茅s et enjeux de pouvoir (forthcoming).
听 - Collu, Samuele. 鈥�#Zoombies: Cybernetic Trance in Pandemic Times.鈥� In Planetary Health: Humanities and Pandemics, 199-217. London: Routledge, 2024. ()
听 - Collu, Samuele and Eric Taggart. 鈥淩est so Deep Now,鈥� Anthropology and Humanism 48(2): 49-50, 2023. ()
听 - Collu, Samuele. 鈥淎 Therapy of Screens: Psychotherapy and the Visual Apparatus.鈥� Anthropological Quarterly 93(4): 729-53, 2020. ()
听 - Collu, Samuele. 鈥淩efracting Affects: Affect, Psychotherapy, and Spirit Dis-Possession.鈥� Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 43(2): 290-314, 2019. ()
听 - Collu, Samuele and Jean-Philippe Bombay. 鈥淎 Scroll Through the Present.鈥� In Soigner La Technologie? Cahier D鈥橢nqu锚tes, Stasis, 70-103. Montr茅al: Grip UQAM, 2020. ()
听 - Collu, Samuele, 鈥淭he Zoomification of Everyday Life.鈥� Social Sciences Perspectives on the 鈥淣ew Normal,鈥� 2020 (video-presentation. )