Dr Ash Watson

Dr Ash Watson is a Scientia Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney and a sociologist of technology, culture and storytelling.

Her research examines the gap between the promise and the reality of emerging technologies. She is interested in how people understand, feel and experience digital change; the sociotechnical dimensions of belonging, wellbeing and inclusion; people's DIY, alternative and marginal digital creative/cultural practices; and the promissory and speculative discourses surrounding AI.

Ash has an international profile for her innovative methodological work which unites qualitative, creative and digital sociological methods. Conceptually, her work engages with affect theory, queer theory and practice, more-than-human theory and sociomaterial approaches to expectation, knowledge/sense, narratives and futures.

In 2024 she was a visiting research fellow at the ESRC Centre for SocioDigital Futures at the University of Bristol.

In 2017 she was an Endeavour Research Fellow based at Goldsmiths, University of London, as part of her doctoral program. 

Ash is Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review. She is an invited Editorial Board Member of the leading methodological journal Qualitative Research and of DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, the first academic journal dedicated to this theme. 

Her debut novel Into the Sea was published by Brill in 2020. She runs the independent zine publisher Frances St Press and is the creator/editor of So Fi Zine, an open-access publication for experiments in social inquiry.