John Marlovits

Assist. Professor
Ph.D. UC Santa Cruz, 2008

Expertise:
Medical anthropology and psychiatry, science and technology, popular culture and publics

Office Hours: Will resume Spring 2025

Clark Hall 404J
408-924-6541
john.marlovits@sjsu.edu

John Marlovits’ work addresses affect and psychogeography – the psychic and material infrastructures of everyday life -- and the way in which place-based practices facilitate personal and collective transformation.  Marlovits’ research has focused on places – such as Seattle, California, Osaka – where the utopian, the futuristic, the retro, and the dystopian intermingle in odd combinations, shaping tensions that generate imaginative responses to cultural impasses, and formulating emerging and jury-rigged worlds.  Marlovits is drawn to hybrid and “bad subjects” – such as the depressed, the skateboarder, the bohemian, the slacker, or the surf bum – that live out their cultural impasse, refuse its normativities, and seek new forms of personhood beyond melancholic attachments to impossible, or highly labor-disciplined, lives.  He has written about psychogeographies of depression and the affective contradictions of neoliberalism in Seattle; and is currently working on a project titled “Stupid Wooden Toys: Infrastructure and the Dream-Work of Skateboarding” that examines skateboarding as a vernacular design practice for remaking publics and spaces of belonging in the margins of capitalist ruins.