Dr Mark Carrigan is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester, where he co-leads the Digital Education Manchester group and serves as an AI Fellow at the Institute for Teaching and Learning. His work centres on three interconnected commitments: developing ontological and epistemological frameworks for understanding Large Language Models (LLMs), moving beyond the anthropomorphic and reductive accounts which currently dominate public and academic discourse; examining higher education as a critical site where the social and cultural dynamics of LLMs unfold through practical challenges; and advancing Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach as a route to addressing these urgent questions.

Originally trained as a philosopher and sociologist, his work draws on a range of intellectual sources including philosophical anthropology, digital sociology, platform studies and psychoanalysis. These theoretical interests have led him to train as a group analyst, exploring how dynamics of reliance, dependence and addiction play out in relation to everyday use of social platforms and LLMs, particularly amongst young men. His long-term theoretical project is to incorporate elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Archerian realism.

He is the author of Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are (Routledge, 2025), which develops a framework for understanding personal transformation in the digital age. His recent work includes Generative AI for Academics (Sage, 2024) and Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2nd edition), alongside eight other books. He co-edited Building the Post-Pandemic University (Edward Elgar, 2023), examining how universities are transforming in response to technological and social disruption.

As joint coordinator of the Critical Realism Network, council member of the International Association for Critical Realism, and trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism, he works to bridge theoretical and practical approaches to understanding social change in a digital age.