Adrian Parr

Adrian Parr (born 1967) is an Australian born philosopher and cultural critic. A specialist on the French continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze, she has published on the sustainability movement, climate change politics, activist culture, and creative practice.

Biography
Parr was born in Sydney Australia. Her father, Mike Parr, and her aunt, Julie Rrap, are contemporary Australian artists who introduced Parr to the world of radical and activist culture at an early age. She attended elementary school for a period in Vienna, Austria and as a child travelled with her parents throughout the former East Bloc and West Europe.

She completed her Bachelors Degree with First Class Honors in Philosophy at Deakin University in 1998, followed by a Master's in Philosophy there in 2000. She earned her PhD from Monash University in 2002 under the direction of the feminist philosopher Claire Colebrook. Parr’s PhD dissertation “Creative Production: From Da Vinci to Deleuze” was revised and published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2003.

After a brief stint teaching at Deakin and RMIT Universities she accepted a position at Savannah College of Art and Design. During her time there she edited The Deleuze Dictionary (2005) with Columbia University Press and co-edited a volume of collected papers on Deluze, published by Edinburgh University Press. While in Savannah, Adrian also co-founded (with Avantika Bawa and Celina Jeffery) Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (www.drainmag.com). In 2006 she moved to the University of Cincinnati, and from 2008 to 2013 has published four books, one each with MIT Press, Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, and Columbia University Press. In 2011 she was awarded her university's Rieveschl Award for Scholarly and Creative Work.

Parr has spoken on her work at the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Cornell University, UC Irvine, Calgary University, ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany, The Ohio State University, the Museum of Sydney,  the Opera House of Sydney, and the FreshOutlook Foundation. WCPO Nightly News and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission have interviewed Parr for her views on environmental degradation and climate change politics. In 2010 she presented a TED talk for TEDxCincy.

Parr currently holds a joint appointment with the Department of Sociology and the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati.

Works
In 2003 Parr published her Ph.D dissertation, Creative Production: from Da Vinci to Deleuze. The press changed the title to, Exploring the Work of Leonardo da Vinci. In it, she examines the connections between science, technology, philosophy, art, and design developing a concept of creative production.
 * Exploring the Work of Leonardo da Vinci (2003)

The Deleuze Dictionary provides an introduction to the concepts developed by the French continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In addition to the definitions of key Deleuzian concepts, the dictionary provides the reader with a series of ‘connectives.’ In the spirit of Deleuze, who proclaimed concepts are tools, the ‘connectives’ puts the concepts to work in areas such as politics, architecture, art, and cinema. The book was published by  Columbia UP in 2005, and a revised and expanded 2nd edition was published jointly by  Edinburgh UP and Columbia UP in 2010).A second revised edition of the book was published in 2010. The book was reviewed by the academic journals Continental Philosophy  and French Studies
 * The Deleuze Dictionary (2005, 2010)

Co-edited with Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and the Contemporary World, brings together a group of Deleuze theorists to consider issues ranging from Middle East studies, to refugees, and traumatic events, using the concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari to analyze and describe a variety of situations including militarism, the Holocaust, citizenship, immigration, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and colonization.The books was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2006, and reviewed by French Studies
 * Deleuze and the Contemporary World (2006)

Parr’s second work, Deleuze and Memorial Culture, combines critical theory, cultural studies, and media theory with empirical research on trauma to describe the political scope of collective remembrance such as 9/11, the Holocaust, and the Amish shooting in Pennsylvania. At the centre of this book is a discussion of the politics of collective trauma; how trauma is politicized and in turn carries within it a political potential. The book was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2008, and reviewed by Future Anterior
 * Deleuze and Memorial Culture'' (2008)

In Hijacking Sustainability,  she  moves away from a tightly Deleuzian analysis, aligning more directly with activist theory. The book explains how the  sustainability movement  has been hijacked by the corporate sector, military, and government. She debunks the notion that individuals can buy their way out of the environmental problem through green consumption, and examines the greening of consumption with green brands, the contradictory stance of greening the violent operations of the military, the symbolic struggles waged over the greening of the White House, and the appropriation of sustainable development initiatives in low to middle-income countries. Critics of Hijacking Sustainability have pointed out that at times Parr’s views of sustainability are overly idealistic. For instance, she contends ecovillages provide an important experiment in social and environmentally sustainable living. Jean Hillier has argued that this is far too idealist and points out that the life of an ecovillager is premised upon opting out of the mainstream, and for sustainability to really gain traction the movement cannot afford to turn its back on the everyday. The book was published by MIT Press in  2009, and reviewed by The Guardian, the academic journals Sympoke, Radical Philosophy,  Spontaneous Generations: a Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and by the  Electronic Green Journal,
 * Hijacking Sustainability (2009)

In 2010 Parr and her husband, Michael Zaretsky, published New Directions in Sustainable Design, an anthology presenting a variety sustainable design and development initiatives, combining the viewpoints of practitioners and scholars. The central idea is that sustainable design is not simply about making something, but about changing the way people live, and their relationship to the world and one another. The book was published in London by Routledge in 2010.
 * New Directions in Sustainable Design (2010)

In her most recent work,  The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, she  investigates the intersection of social and environmental justice issues. In it she describes how the principles of neoliberalism (privatization, free market fundamentalism, individualism) are being used to respond to the practical questions posed by climate change. Her thesis is  that neoliberal doctrine has infiltrated the politics of the environmental movement. The book was published by Columbia University Press in 2012
 * The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (2013)