A GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH PROJECT, FUNDED BY THE IRISH RESEARCH COUNCIL (2018-21)

This project explores how engaging with processes of fiction can help to parse imaginaries, lived realities and power relations of networked digital worlds. The primary method of inquiry here is a research-creation writing workshop called Engineering Fictions.

The research is based at Maynooth University and engages with the Building City Dashboards (BCD) team under the guidance of Prof. Rob Kitchin. Other research participants and collaborators include members of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG) at CONNECT, and other interested individuals from the public.

As well as two Engineering Fictions sessions, the project has so far hosted a series of four research-creation workshops called Orienteering Fictions (June 2019) in collaboration with the Russel Library at Maynooth University, the BCD team and OMG CONNECT.

From Sept-Nov 2020, I’ll also be running a series of Engineering Fictions workshops in collaboration with the team from Policing Digital Futures in Scotland. This engagement will involve two writing workshops and the online publication of a chapbook, exploring themes of online state surveillance and policing against the backdrop of the Coronavirus Pandemic. I’ll use my engagement with these workshops to reflect on how I devise and host Engineering Fictions sessions.

I’m currently writing a book on the technique and philosophy of Engineering Fictions. It will contextualise my research-creation practice as a form critical pedagogy, informed by intersectional feminism, that facilitates radical conversation and poetry behind the scenes of data technology research and application. The book will outline why this kind of process based and creative research practice is so urgent today, particularly in relation to ‘online’ life and data technologies.