Victor Shammas
Sociologist · Associate Professor, University of Bergen
Victor Shammas is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen and holds a PhD from the University of Oslo (2017). His work moves across political economy, critical theory, comparative penology, and digital sociology, with articles published in journals such as Punishment & Society, British Journal of Criminology, Constellations, and Capital & Class. He also writes the newsletter Theory Brief — about global politics, culture, and social theory. Research: victorshammas.com
Research Notes
- AI and Authenticity
August 19, 2026
In recent months we’ve seen a wider debate over the use of AI in both academic research and among students pursuing higher education. But much anti-AI positioning seems to rely on its weakest argument. Yes, there are legitimate questions about veracity — about truthfulness, accuracy, and hallucinations — and about deskilling, particularly with regard to students. But the least convincing claim on the anti-AI side is that of authenticity, because authenticity is such a deeply problematic category. We’re never simply authentic; Adorno taught us that in the 1960s in The Jargon of Authenticity. We’re always-already embedded in a social order, which means we benefit from or are disadvantaged by the social relations that we find ourselves caught up in. We’re enmeshed in a social fabric that punishes or rewards us, conferring unfair advantages or disadvantages, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out over decades of research. There is, therefore, no natural, spontaneous self with which we can authentically be in communication. We’re augmented or disadvantaged by the mere fact of being social beings or products of societies.
- What Is Hermeneutic AI?
July 3, 2026
Hermeneutics is the discipline of interpretation: the art and theory of understanding texts, actions, and forms of life. It runs from the exegesis of scripture through philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer to the interpretive turn in the social sciences — the insistence, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, that the study of culture is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”