// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did Stefano Harney's cat say? "Harney to stay.

Stefano Harney (born 1962) is an American scholar, writer and teacher whose work spans critical theory, autonomist and postcolonial thought, Black studies, management, logistics and forms of social organization. He is professor of transversal aesthetics at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM).

Harney is particularly known for his long-running collaboration with poet and theorist Fred Moten. Their books The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2021) develop concepts including study, fugitivity, debt, logistics, sociality and the "undercommons".

Education

Harney received a bachelor's degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1985 and a master's degree in American Studies from New York University in 1988. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1993.

Academic career

After completing his doctorate, Harney worked as a manager in the Anti-Racism Secretariat of the government of Ontario from 1993 to 1995. He subsequently taught anthropology at Pace University and sociology at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, and was a visiting lecturer in Art and Public Policy at New York University. In 2003 he joined the Management Centre at the University of Leicester, where he later became Reader in Governance and Strategy. From 2006 he taught at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London, becoming Professor of Strategy and serving as Associate Dean. Harney joined the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University in 2012 as Professor of Strategic Management Education. His work during this period included research and teaching concerned with management education, organization, academic labour and alternatives to conventional forms of pedagogy. Harney later became an honorary professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and has taught at the Dutch Art Institute and the European Graduate School. He subsequently joined the Academy of Media Arts Cologne as professor of transversal aesthetics.

Work

Harney's scholarship has addressed nationalism, public administration, labour, management, logistics, education and collective forms of study through cultural studies, autonomist thought and postcolonial theory. His first book, Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (1996), examines nationalism and cultural identity in Trinidad and Tobago and its diaspora through writers including Samuel Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and C. L. R. James. In State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (2002), Harney examines the labour of government employees and the organization of the state. Drawing on public administration, organizational sociology and poststructuralist theory, the book uses the autonomist concept of "mass intellectuality" to consider forms of knowledge and cooperation produced by state workers. His later work increasingly connected critiques of management with questions of logistics, racial capitalism, education and collective study. His books in this area include The Culture of Management (2008) and The Liberal Arts and Management Education: A Global Agenda for Change (2020), co-authored with Howard Thomas. Harney has described his research as concerned with the social organization of working-class life and with forms of collective activity that exceed formal institutions. A 2026 event at the University of London Institute in Paris described his work as examining social organization across workplaces, schools, universities, neighborhoods, leisure spaces and other sites of everyday life.

Collaboration With Fred Moten

Harney has collaborated with Fred Moten since the 1990s on questions of academic labour, Black radical thought, sociality and collective study. Their 2004 essay "The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses", published in Social Text, developed the concept of the "undercommons" in relation to the university and the figure of the "subversive intellectual". These ideas were expanded in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, published by Minor Compositions and Autonomedia in 2013. The collection draws on the Black radical tradition to examine the university, debt, logistics, governance and forms of collective study. The book was made freely available digitally on publication and subsequently circulated widely in academic, artistic and activist contexts. The New Yorker described the book as a critique of the professionalized university and an argument for informal and collective practices of study. Harney and Moten have emphasized that their concept of study is not restricted to educational institutions. In interviews they have described study as a form of common intellectual activity that can take place while working, talking, walking, making music or engaging in other collective practices. Their second full-length book together, All Incomplete, was published by Minor Compositions in 2021, with a foreword by Denise Ferreira da Silva and photographs and an afterword by Zun Lee. The book extends themes developed in The Undercommons, particularly through a critique of individuation, logistics, sovereignty and the idea of completion. Reviewing the book in the Sydney Review of Books, Andrew Brooks described incompleteness as central to Harney and Moten's account of sociality and resistance to enclosure and private property. Harney and Moten have also collaborated through lectures, conversations and collective projects.

Collaborative projects

Alongside his academic writing, Harney has participated in collaborative artistic, pedagogical and curatorial projects.

Harney has collaborated with performance artist Valentina Desideri since 2011, when they met at the Performance Art Forum in Saint-Erme, France. Their essay "A Conspiracy Without a Plot" was published in the 2013 collection The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff. A French translation, "Une conspiration sans complot", was published in the journal Multitudes in 2023.

Harney is also a member of the Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, a group of researchers, writers and musicians who organize public listening sessions and musical seminars. The collective meets to play music and discuss listening as a form of theorization and social practice. Its members include Fred Moten, Dhanveer Singh Brar, Fumi Okiji, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Louis Moreno, Paul Rekret, Edward George and Harney.

Harney is a member of freethought, a collective formed in 2011 with Irit Rogoff, Adrian Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis Moreno and Nora Sternfeld. Freethought was one of the artistic directors of the 2016 Bergen Assembly in Norway, where its programme focused on infrastructure.

As part of the Bergen Assembly, Harney co-curated the exhibition Shipping and the Shipped with Mumbai-based artist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar. The exhibition examined the histories and infrastructures of shipping in relation to those who have been forcibly transported, and included work by Kandalgaonkar, Wu Tsang and Fred Moten, and Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva. The project formed part of freethought's wider Infrastructure programme for the triennial.

Works

• The Liberal Arts and Management Education: A Global Agenda for Change (co-authored by Howard Thomas, Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (co-authored by Fred Moten, Minor Compositions, 2013)
• The Culture of Management (Routledge, 2008)
• State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke University Press, 2002)
• "Fragment on Kropotkin and Giuliani" in Social Text (Volume 20, Number 3 (72), Duke University Press, September 10, 2002)
• Nationalism and Identity (Zed Books, 1996)