Simone Pellegrino

Studying at Goldsmiths

I am a PhD researcher in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, where I investigate the contemporary engagement with notions of fate and fortune across a range of what I call oracular cultural practices, and the capitalist hegemony it reveals.

PhD Research

From the connotations of luck, fate and (mis)fortune in both mainstream and online media texts, to the perception of the peculiarly entropic, non-deterministic functioning of large language models (LLMs) in generative and agential artificial intelligence (AI) that turns the machine into an oracle-like medium, I draw on critical theory to examine the ordinary experience of affective discourses of fate and fortune as socio-cultural meanings of the 21st century. 

The equal horizons of novelty and possibility they project, and the magical explanation they provide for unpredictable occurrences, are closely inspected vis-à-vis their condensed surrogation of temporality, which is functional to the control and exercise of power in an age of contingency and uncertainty, where historicity is in fact weakened. Therefore, a new critique of late capitalism is proposed in this project.

Questions of temporality and space, consciousness and attention, affectivity and desire are central, as I evaluate the opportunities and risks that some aesthetics of contingency have on the state of agency in the meta-modern individual.

I presented my research at academic conferences in Europe and the United States. At 23, I am also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Undergraduate studies at Goldsmiths

Finding a passion

I first fell in love with the idea of applying philosophy to mediated cultural processes during my undergraduate studies at Goldsmiths, completed in 2023.

I assisted with the ‘21st Century Magic and Spirituality in Media and Culture’, a symposium hosted by the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, which fostered a cross-disciplinary interchange on spiritual practices with scholars from other internationally leading institutions, such as MIT (USA), Rutgers University (USA), Concordia University (Canada), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland).

Skill specialism

I also specialised in mobile and print journalism with a training in news and feature writing, sub-editing and fact-checking. I collaborated with fellow students to create Blurr, an online magazine that explored the concept of the other. I was picked as the co-editor of Tablecloth, a cultural magazine whose first printed issue was published in March 2023.

Work experience

I did a work placement with the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service partner, Epsom and Ewell Times, a not-for-profit publication in Surrey, England. My journalistic work also appeared on The Tab and EastLondonLines.

Advice for future students

Come prepared to question everything, yourself included - it is the biggest opportunity Goldsmiths offers to its creative and engaged students.

Favourite spots around campus

Our campus is in New Cross, where contamination thrives in a transcultural production of smells, tastes and ideas.

My go-to pub is The Rose.

My favourite reading spot on campus is the last bench on College Green, just next to the tennis courts and the Professor Stuart Hall building.