About

I’m a digital anthropologist whose work bridges academia and public policy. My research has mainly focused on how people overcome their own exclusion from digital spaces and how communities develop bottom-up innovations to close the digital divide.

For more than a decade, my research has explored many dimensions of digital inequality – the uneven impact of digital technologies on our societies and our everyday lives. I’m interested in how people who aren’t receiving the benefits of the digital world overcome or subvert systems and technologies that don’t work for them.

I have studied the way technological elites shape urban geographies and politics in the Middle East, the role of public libraries in closing the digital divide in the UK, and the planetary politics of telecoms infrastructure. I believe research is a crucial element of informed digital inclusion policy, and I regularly do interviews, deliver formal submissions and briefings, and write policy reports on digital exclusion, digital poverty, and data/digital rights.

My more recent research examined community networks – internet networks built, owned and operated by local communities rather than traditional telecoms companies. I’m interested in alternative ownership models for internet infrastructure and ISPs that challenge traditional commercial markets for connectivity, which have long failed to connect “hard-to-reach” unconnected communities.

I use ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviewing, and peer research to surface the complex relationship between people and infrastructure, physical geography and digital connectivity, technological autonomy and exploitation. (For a glimpse into one of these networks and the community it serves, check out an old newsletter I wrote spotlighting five examples of community networks, or a podcast I produced for GenderIT.org about a computer club in rural Lancashire.)

CURRENT

I’m the Chief Policy Analyst for the Virginia Joint Commission on Technology & Science, a permanent, bipartisan and bicameral legislative agency that studies and makes recommendations on science- and technology-related issues affecting the Commonwealth of Virginia.

ETC

Over the years, I’ve collaborated on innovative multimedia productions from podcasts to films with academics, litigators, activists, and public health professionals all over the world. You can find some of that work in the Expore! section of this site.

LINKS

Here’s my abridged résumé.
Download: my 100 wd bio + headshot.

*My website is designed to be a low carbon / low energy demand site.*