Emotional Materialism: A Quadriptych is a book-length, peer-reviewed work of philosophical inquiry, published in Portable Gray (University of Chicago Press, in association with the Gray Center for Critical Inquiry). It examines how material culture and visual art are processed through embodied experience, and advances an original conceptual framework — "emotional materialism" — for understanding the relationship between affect, feeling, material form, and the image.

The work makes three principal contributions. First, it intervenes in affect theory by distinguishing affect as pre-discursive intensity from feeling as its socially mediated articulation, and by arguing that material culture constitutes the primary medium through which this passage occurs. Second, it contributes to debates in visual culture and picture theory by theorising the image not as an object of detached contemplation but as an event — an agentive "doing" that acts upon the perceiving body. Third, it extends scholarship on diasporic imagination and migratory forms by demonstrating how the fractured psyche of displacement is mapped, held, and sustained through material and aesthetic practice.

Methodologically, the work is significant for its hybrid form: it integrates poetry, visual art, and theoretical reflection as co-equal modes of inquiry, modelling a practice-led approach to philosophical writing in which form enacts argument. This method is tested across four interrelated movements:

The Embodied Archive: Haptics, Gesture, and the Labour of Looking examines making and beholding as embodied epistemologies, reconceiving the archive as a sediment of gesture rather than a repository of documents.
Collective Processing: Translation and the Commons of Feeling develops a framework for the transcultural circulation of concepts, theorising feeling as a shared and circulating substance rather than private interiority.
The Materiality of Emotion: Colour, Texture, and the Geometry of Inner Life analyses how abstraction — through colour, texture, and geometric form — operates as a language adequate to psychological states that figuration cannot represent.
Introspection as Aesthetic Politics: Memory, Desire, Repair synthesises the preceding movements, examining how memory, desire, and trauma are negotiated within aesthetic and political fields, and what it means for the wounded subject to compose, rather than merely survive, a self.

The research underpins a wider body of curatorial and scholarly work on embodied looking, wearable art, and curatorial methodologies, and establishes conceptual foundations for subsequent outputs in the author's Emotional Materialism project.