Research
Five questions I keep returning to.
Browse by theme
5 of 5 themes
Theme 01
Human Behaviour & Decision-Making
How ordinary decisions are made under uncertainty, obligation and time pressure — and what changes when a recommendation arrives from a system rather than a person.
Current questions
- What do people treat as evidence when a machine and a person disagree?
- How is a decision distributed across family, colleagues and institutions before it is 'made'?
- When does automation reduce deliberation rather than support it?
Future directions
Comparative work on decision environments across clinical, university and public-service settings.
Reading
- Mary Douglas — Risk and Blame
- Lucy Suchman — Human–Machine Reconfigurations
- Annemarie Mol — The Logic of Care
Theme 02
Digital Trust
Trust is treated here as a practice, not a score: something negotiated, withdrawn and repaired in relation to institutions long before any individual system is evaluated.
Current questions
- What is being trusted — the model, the institution deploying it, or the person presenting it?
- How is trust repaired after a system fails someone?
- Why does accuracy so often fail to produce confidence?
Future directions
A grounded framework for trust that institutions can use without reducing it to a survey item.
Reading
- Niklas Luhmann — Trust and Power
- Onora O'Neill — A Question of Trust
- Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Theme 03
Medical Anthropology & AI in Healthcare
Clinical work is moral work. Introducing predictive systems into it redistributes authority, responsibility and blame in ways that rarely appear in evaluation studies.
Current questions
- Whose knowledge counts when clinical judgement is machine-mediated?
- How do patients experience being assessed by a system they cannot question?
- What happens to accountability when a recommendation has no author?
Future directions
Ethnographic work with frontline health workers adopting decision-support tools.
Reading
- Arthur Kleinman — The Illness Narratives
- Paul Farmer — Pathologies of Power
- Deborah Lupton — Digital Health
Theme 04
Digital Anthropology & Human-Centred AI
Everyday digital life is where AI is actually encountered: in feeds, forms, chat interfaces and the small negotiations people make to get through a system.
Current questions
- How do people domesticate AI tools into existing routines?
- What workarounds reveal about the gap between designed and lived use?
- What would it mean for a system to adapt to people rather than the reverse?
Projects
Future directions
Design-facing translations of ethnographic findings for product and service teams.
Reading
- Daniel Miller — The Comfort of Things
- Genevieve Bell & Paul Dourish — Divining a Digital Future
- Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology
Theme 05
Policy, Ethics & the Imagined User
Policy documents contain a person: informed, connected, literate, unhurried. Much of the harm in AI governance comes from the distance between that person and the real one.
Current questions
- Which human does AI policy imagine, and who falls outside it?
- How do ethical principles survive translation into procurement and practice?
- What would participatory AI governance look like in an African context?
Projects
Future directions
Contributions to national and institutional AI governance debates grounded in empirical behaviour.
Reading
- Sheila Jasanoff — The Ethics of Invention
- Virginia Eubanks — Automating Inequality
- Langdon Winner — Do Artifacts Have Politics?