Dr. Derek Barker-Ciganik

Dr. Derek Barker-Ciganik is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of African Studies at the University of Vienna and Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Identity Group Theory (ISIGT). His research develops Identity Group Theory (IGT), an interdisciplinary framework that seeks to explain how identities organise social behaviour through narratives, norms, resource allocation, and systems of regulation. His work brings together psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, economics, and communication studies to examine topics including social identity, motivation, artificial intelligence, digital communities, academic knowledge production, and social order. He has published widely in the fields of identity, culture, and critical social theory and is currently completing Critical Humanism: Universality, Fallibilism, and the Ethics of Disagreement, forthcoming with Manchester University Press. His current research explores identity as a foundational infrastructure through which cooperation, legitimacy, and collective behaviour are organised in contemporary societies.