Dr Ash Watson

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

She is interested in 'artificial' artificial intelligence; the promissory discourses of emerging tech; the sociotechnical dimensions of belonging, health and wellbeing; and how people sense, feel and experience digital change. She is currently a new study in partnership with public libraries on the loop between digital and social inequality.

Ash has an international profile for her innovative methodological work which unites qualitative, creative and digital sociological methods. She explores innovative research methods that grapple with storytelling, collective feelings, imaginaries, moods, atmospheres and vibes. Conceptually her work engages with affect theory, queer theory and practice, and sociomaterial approaches to expectation, knowledge/sense, narratives and futures. She also works on alternative and DIY creative cultural practices.

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.