Digital afterlives of nature (Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship): We live in an era where our activities are increasingly tied to the futures of natural ecosystems. This research will address how digital technologies are being used to confront, counter and cope with habitat loss and species extinctions. I document three grassroots campaigns in Scotland, Singapore and India using ethnographic methods. This interdisciplinary research will provide lively accounts of multi-species encounters arising from virtual struggles against environmental loss, thus contributing to urgent contemplation on human-nature relationships.

Hot property pilot (seed-funded by Newcastle University’s Pioneer Award): High temperatures have created new axes of inequalities between those who can keep afford to keep cool and those who cannot. Current policy and industry approaches fail to consider the intersecting inequalities, spatial realities and socio-legal arrangements e.g., leasehold laws, that configure day-to-day experiences of residential over-heating. In the pilot research, I examine the unequal lived experience of residential overheating in an apartment block in a London borough that is predicted to be a near-future ‘hotspot’ for record-breaking high temperatures. The pilot work in 2021 builds on initial work undertaken in summer 2020 partly in collaboration with BBC Panorama and separately on Applied Comics. Here is a slide with some sobering stats and a comic by Irina Richards that summarises the work so far, taken from my presentation at the RGS-IBG conference 2021:

Creative Fuse North East (AHRC-funded): The Creative Fuse North East (CFNE) project revolved around the creative, digital and IT industry (CDIT) sector in North East UK. The project consisted of two phases over two and a half years: The first phase involved the empirical mapping of the sector, and the second phase saw the application of knowledge gleaned from the first phase to develop and implement ‘Innovation Pilot’ initiatives. These initiatives were intended to cross disciplines and sectors to bring businesses, public organisations and academics from the five North East universities together. Alongside Dr Cathrine Degnen, I led on an ethnography of the project to fulfil Work Package 7 of CFNE. We followed the project between November 2016 and June 2018, documenting the processes, practices, networks and narratives within the project. Our aim was to critically understand the nature of interdisciplinarity in the (co)production of knowledge and innovation. To read our work package report, please contact either of us directly. We intend to publish our findings in 2019-2020. (keywords: interdisciplinarity, knowledge (co)production, innovation)