I am a researcher and writer based in London, UK. I focus on the politics of class and social movements in relation to questions of the biopolitical (scientific and technological) governance of our ability to work, economic crisis, and our identity and psychic life in racial, colonial and patriarchal capitalism. I was born and raised in Greece and I have lived in the UK since the late 1990s.

Since the early 2000s I have engaged with (digital) politics and culture, through editorial work and writing in Mute (2002–2021), a magazine on art, technology and politics. In Mute, I wrote on art, popular music history, workfare, anti-austerity movements and the questions of technology and subjectivity in communist imaginaries.

In 2019, I published a book with Pluto Press called Surplus Citizens. It is based on research in the context of Greece's debt crisis (2010–2017) and brings into conversation the different movements, protest and solidarity infrastructures created by those rendered economically ‘superfluous’. It traces how movements responded to obstacles in that turbulent period—from the internal dynamics of activist groups, to the policing of movements and the rise of the far right—and looks at how imaginaries of solidarity, autonomy, democracy and universality came up against the class, patriarchal and racialised underpinnings of national citizenship. This work was based on my PhD (Kent, 2016) and subsequent research.

In 2020-24, my research focused on algorithmic mental health, brain, and related genomic predictive technologies and their broader infrastructures (e.g. via the burgeoning ‘new eugenics’, neuro-optimisation and digital attention surveillance). This work shows how these technologies enable biopolitical and bioeconomic constructions of class and race and forms of data-driven exploitation in education. It was part of collaborative projects funded by the Wellcome Trust and Leverhulme Trust on which I was postdoctoral researcher / fellow (University of Lincoln, 2020–21; University of Edinburgh, 2022–24).

Since mid-2024, I work in the independent research organisation LRD, researching work, technology and several aspects of trade union organising and collective bargaining. In 2025, among other projects for labour unions, I collected union reps' experiences of AI adoption in UK workplaces and produced an 80-page organising and bargaining guide on AI, published in 2026. In 2026–27, I am working on a commissioned project on 'AI in the Public Sector' with the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) and the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU). I regularly give and organise talks on work, technology and mental health.

I continue to write independently and participate in various community, political and artistic projects. Forthcoming writing is on the themes of attention/inattention; utopia, temporality and psychosis; the psycho-politics of work and technologies of care and coercion. I support ARM, I volunteer at a community peer mental health support space in Walthamstow, and I am in training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Guild of Psychotherapists in London.

Contact

dimitra [dot] kotouza [at] icloud [dot] com

for labour research enquiries: dimitra [dot] kotouza [at] lrd [dot] org [dot] uk.