Blog Entries

Will Robots Steal Our Jobs?

I’ve jumped on the bandwagon. At the moment everybody’s talking about how developments in artificial intelligence are going to affect the labour market, with researchers, policy-makers, businesses, and tech companies clamouring to figure out how the world of work is going to change in the upcoming decades because of AI. Last year I worked on

Trans Pride Brighton – Streaming to 50,000 Viewers

I’ve spent the past 7 months working with Trans Pride Brighton to organise their first ever livestream Pride event. Trans Pride Brighton has been going since 2013 and is the largest Trans Pride event outside the USA. This year’s online festival showcased the work of trans, non-binary and intersex performers and activists to an audience of 50,000 people. We even made it onto the Twitch homepage! Check out the event here.

Universities’ Role in Building Back London

I recently worked on a project with UCL’s Public Policy team exploring how universities can help to implement an inclusive economy in a post-COVID-19 London. The results of our consultation with academics, policy makers and industry experts has been written up into a blog post, check it out here.

“Hackers” is 25 Years Old Today!

Happy birthday Hackers! First released on 15th September 1995, this classic cheesefest holds a special place in my heart. The first time I watched it was with my brother and we bonded over its ridiculous techno-babble and phenomenal outfits. Years later I would get to watch the film in a packed tent at UK hacker

Hack_Curio + Chaos Communication Congress

Hack_Curio is an online collection of video clips and essays about hackers, put together by a team of academics who study hacker culture. After seeing a talk by two of the project’s founders at 36c3, I offered to write an entry about the Chaos Communication Congress itself based on the documentary “All Creatures Welcome” by Sandra Trostel. Check it out here.

Zoom Out: Why Universities Need Autonomous Technological Capacities

Universities are shifting en masse to solutions like Zoom or Microsoft Teams to manage remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is vital that classrooms do not become spaces for data extraction. I’m part of a collective called Zoom Out that’s pushing universities to adopt in-house open source solutions. You can read our manifesto, and an overview of Zoom’s privacy and security violations, on Medium.

Meet: The Institute of Making

Tucked away on University College London’s main campus in Bloomsbury is the Institute of Making, the university’s in-house makerspace and materials library. Founded in 2013 by academics at UCL, the goal of the Institute of Making is to provide a place where students and staff can get hands-on experience with tools of all kinds –

Mapping Feminists Coding Practices Symposium

I spent yesterday up at the University of Sussex at a free symposium hosted by the Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology (FACT///.) research network. Despite being one of my local universities I don’t make it up to campus nearly often enough, so it was great to meet some of the researchers based at the Sussex

Chaos Communication Congress

Last week I was at the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig to talk on a panel about building inclusive hacker and maker communities. The Congress is organised annually by Europe’s largest hacker association, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), and is the continent’s oldest and largest hacker convention. This year it hosted 16,000 visitors who

Building Inclusive Makerspaces Workshop at EMF Camp 2018

As part of this year’s EMF Camp I organised a workshop to share information on how to build inclusive makerspaces. In the first part of the workshop I presented some of the results from my research on diversity and inclusivity issues in makerspaces, then I opened the floor up to a roundtable discussion with other