Strangeways Idea Lab has a long prehistory consisting of numerous formal, informal, and occasionally even sponsored reading and research groups, including the New Materialisms Research Unit (NMRU) and related initiatives. Over the years, these inquiries and interventions have cut across domains including anthropology, intellectual and political history, metaphysics, philosophies of technology and time, political theology, and security studies. Topics have included the early seminars of structural psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (read alongside media studies); biopolitical philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project; French philosopher Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism; Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy of science; Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (via Laurence Lampert and Leo Strauss); psychogeography and infrastructure; the political realism and statecraft of Henry Kissinger; Édouard Glissant on the archipelagic and Sylvia Wynter on the human; “desert power” (via Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah, and Fatima Mernissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam); and critical-diagnostic engagements with the radical right on political technology and polycrisis (including Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola, and Aleksandr Dugin). Reading any figures or texts does not imply endorsement.