Langston H Swiecki

Born and raised in California, I stayed close to home for undergrad, attending UC Berkeley and graduating in 2020 with BAs in both History and Physics, straddling the STEM/Humanities divide the best I could. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this generated an interest in the history of science and a general curiosity about how knowledge production interrelates with sociocultural forces. This curiosity led me east to the University of Chicago, where I earned an MA in the History of Science by examining a process in theoretical physics known as renormalization. By looking into its origins as a heuristic tool in a wartime sonar lab and the messy, haphazard path it took towards theoretical concreteness, I sought to assert the deeply productive quality produced by discursive clashing and meetings, despite the tendency of discourses to mask the contested origin of concepts through naturalizing narratives. However manifestly self-evident knowledge is portrayed to be, it remains haunted by the materiality of its own emergence, composed of traces and echoes.

As I continue my journey eastward at Columbia and LSE, I still look for these discursive hauntings, breaks, and dissolutions, but my interests have grown beyond physics. I now find myself most interested in discourses of the subject and discourses of the self. How the body is formed into a political subject, and who is excluded at different points in time, provides a deeply rich space to examine power/knowledge as entangled couplet. Simultaneously, discursive practices that situate the body within population produce regimes of normalization and regulation, and the shifts over time of these can accordingly hold up a mirror to broader societal change. One specific shift I find myself drawn to is the change in how depression was treated and diagnosed in the late 1970s-early 1980s with the rise of the class of drug known as "antidepressants," and particularly how this related to the emergence of neoliberalism and post-industrial economic realities, especially in Britain and the US.

Outside of thinking about history and depression, I quite enjoy rock climbing, backpacking, elevation change in general, and playing bridge.