About this site

My name is Thomas, and this is my blog. I'm a student at the University of Melbourne, studying Politics and Sociology. I am also on Bluesky.

I'm interested in politics and political theory, in particular, questions of democracy and humanity's relationship with the natural world. Posts, essays, and reviews regarding these topics make up the bulk of this blog.

I read a lot of political theory – both for my degree and out of personal interest. I think that there is a problem of the accessibility of political theory. The texts themselves are locked away in university libraries, and the path to accessing them requires costs of time and money that very few are privileged to have. One of my goals is to make political thought more accessible to the general public. In the future, this will hopefully take a variety of forms. For now, I will often posts accessible, non-academic, and (hopefully) illuminating reviews of books and important journal articles I read. I believe that the more people that have access to critical texts, the better our chances are at progressive political change. With luck, hopefully I can share some of what I learn with others who are interested.

This website uses the free and open source (FOSS) software Ghost. I hire server space from a cloud server provider to run this website. Hopefully one day, I'll host this website on a machine I own. Content is routed securely through Cloudflare. I have kept security and anonymity at the front of my mind when designing this site. Ghost comes with several tracking options, all are disabled on this site.

If you would like, there is the option to sign up to an email newsletter. You'll get every post I make directly to your inbox. You can subscribe by inputting your email below. It will probably end up in your spam, so add journal.thomashowell.au to your safe sending domain list.

Thanks for visiting!