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
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.
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.
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
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
I’ve written a practitioner reflection piece for the Journal of Peer Production Issue 12, where I talk about the efforts that maker communities around the world are making to be more inclusive and accessible. It’s a special journal issue on the institutionalisation of makerspaces, so check it out for a bunch of other interesting papers too!
I’m currently working as a research assistant for a team at UCL’s Institute of Education that’s investigating the educational and identity equity potential of makerspaces for young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Back in July we organised a research symposium at UCL’s Institute of Making. Read their write-up of the event here.
When I tell people about my PhD—that I research ways to make technology more engaging for women—I usually brace myself for a reply like this: “Why would you bother to do that? Everyone knows men are just better at technology. It’s science!” It happens more often than you would think, and more often than I’d
A key problem created by gender imbalances in the tech and engineering industries is that it means fewer women than men have access to the means of designing and producing technological artefacts. If most programmers and engineers are men, then most software and hardware is going to be designed by men. As the sociologist Judy