As of last Friday I am Senior Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies (equivalent to Associate Professor in the US) in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. 🎊

Since starting at King’s…

• We’ve supported the development of engaged research-led teaching projects with hundreds of students on modules I co-teach on – most recently on the theme of “investigating infodemic” working with journalists, media organisations and civil society groups. 🧶
• The Public Data Lab, an interdisciplinary research network which I co-founded in 2017, has undertaken 20+ projects involving 500+ contributors. 🌱
• In my role as “External Lead” at the Department of Digital Humanities, I’ve been involved in organising 50+ public-facing events and workshops with researchers from around the world, as well as helping to develop the department’s current strap-line – “critical inquiry with and about the digital” – and associated collaborations and activities with other universities and groups. 🎙
• I’ve co-edited experimental book projects on data journalism (with Liliana Bounegru) and reassembling scholarly communications (with Martin Eve), and have published various articles and chapters on data witnessing, data infrastructure literacy, the datafication of forests, the data epic, data journalism and/as data activism, indices as participatory devices, aspects of data worlds, “fake news” as infrastructural uncanny, infrastructural experiments, histories and historiographies of computational imaginaries and considerations for digital methods research. 📖

This academic year I’ll be focused on finishing the manuscript for Data Worlds, continuing to develop formats and materials for engaged research-led teaching, supporting various projects and activities with the Public Data Lab, and starting a new project on forests (more on this soon!).

Looking back over the past four years (and especially the past 18 months) is a reminder that university work is often also social reproduction work – concerned not just with text-making or argument-making, but with life-making. In spite of all of the various pressures on and changes in universities over the past decade, I hope we can still find spaces within and across them for cultivating care, imagination and the mulch of arrangements from which more equitable forms of co-existence might one day grow.