Joel Bourland earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Western Australia in 2023 within the School of Humanities. His doctoral thesis, titled 'Shock, Illusion, and the Commodification of Experience: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Modernity,' was supervised by Nin Kirkham, Tony Hughes-D'Aeth, and Tim Flanagan. The dissertation theorizes how modern technologies and consumer culture condition relationships to self, other, and world, registering an impoverishment of experience through shock-induced anaesthetization of sensory capacities and derived sensibility borrowed from others' eyes, including media personalities. It highlights Benjamin's interlinked concepts of shock, phantasmagoria (illusion), and mimesis, analyzing his social-critical writings against the backdrop of his early speculative philosophy of experience.

Bourland's research specializations lie in critical theory, with a focus on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's philosophical tensions. His chapter 'Whence the Dreamworld?: On False Consciousness in the Benjamin-Adorno Controversy' (2026) delves into their 1938 letters, framing modernity as a dreamworld of mediated hopes, desires, fears, and conspiracies. Tracing Marxism from György Lukács' second nature, it positions Benjamin's phantasmagoria as recasting ideology critique—not as unveiling illusion but negotiating contemporary production conditions. Benjamin exceeds Adorno by refusing to treat illusions as mere falsity, instead seeking to win revolutionary energies from intoxication through viewing the familiar as unfamiliar. In another chapter, ''Filling the inner emptiness of the mask': ethics and performance in the era of simulation' (2026), published in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Performance by Bloomsbury, Bourland argues performance is inescapable in intersubjective thinking and interpretation. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's aesthetics, ethics of the Event, and schizoanalytic subject, he posits cultivating sensibility and personal style amid image-saturated capitalism's universal schizophrenia. To become complete, one breaks oneself into multiplicity of voices and expressions, gaining freedom in selecting Events. Additional research includes 'Queer Theory and the Shamanic Ideal: Towards an anthropology of ecstasy, affect, and sexual pluralism.' Bourland maintains affiliations with the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University, teaching in philosophy, media studies, English, and art history while presenting at conferences like the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (2025).