Research Associates and PhD students

• Laurène Cheilan
  Laurène joined the Centre in March 2023 as Senior Research Associate within the Futures Studio. They completed a PhD in education at the University of Bristol, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie program. Laurène's doctoral research was an auto/ethnography of public engagement institutionalisation in a science research network. They are particularly interested in developing creative methods for facilitating and documenting interdisciplinary collaborations.
• Matt Dowse
  Matt is a Senior Research Associate in the Organizing Domain of the Centre for Sociodigital Futures. Before doing his MSc and PhD in Bristol, Matt worked as a secondary school teacher, ran inclusion projects with community groups, worked in local authorities in various roles, and was the CEO of a homelessness charity in Bristol. His research interests focus on alternative ways of organizing, inter-organizational relations, critical approaches that reimagine organizing in complex social contexts, provocative research methods, and coproduction.
• Mike Foden
  Mike joined CenSoF in March 2024 as a Senior Research Associate. Working within the Consuming Domain, his research focuses on changing uses of communication and entertainment technologies in the home and the extent to which they are shaping/being shaped by household routines, relations, and wider social life. Mike’s background is in the sociology and geographies of consumption, everyday life, and social change, especially in relation to sustainability and resource-intensive household practices. Before joining the Centre, he held research positions at Keele University and the University of Sheffield, where his work focused on changing food provisioning practices, most recently in relation to reducing consumption of meat and other animal products.
• Marisela Gutierrez Lopez
  Marisela's background is in the intersection of social sciences, design and engineering. Her main research interest is applying interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive futures. Marisela has worked in a number of industry- and community-facing collaborations, investigating the adoption of emerging technologies in the workplace and how the outcomes of AI can be meaningfully explained to different data publics. At CenSoF, she is particularly interested in exploring methodologically innovative approaches for bringing together different forms of knowledge and expertise across the Centre.
• Nicola Horsley
  Nicola is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, where she investigates the place of digital technologies in everyday life. Nicola’s research interests centre on qualitative inquiry into all aspects of social inclusion and participation, including the marginalisation of particular citizenship, educational and family practices through dominant discourses and the privileging of scientific and technical knowledge as bases for policy making. Her current research within CenSoF’s Caring Domain investigates the use of smart home and communication technologies, exploring sociodigital futures of care through a focus on families’ everyday practices and their relationships with, and through, AI and messaging apps.
• Lisa May Thomas
  A Senior Research Associate within the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, Lisa's work falls within the remit of the Caring Domain, exploring sociodigital futures of care. An award-winning dance and film artist, Lisa works at the intersection of performance and technology and is Artistic Director at Soma, a participatory and virtual reality experience. Lisa is putting together a programme of work including ‘Environments of care’. This new project is exploring the invisible and intangible aspects of our environments and looks at how we might better feel, know, and care for the intangible aspects of the spaces and places we inhabit.
• Carolina Valladares Celis
  Carolina’s research critically explores the integration of digital technologies in education. Her work is concerned with making forms of dominance visible and exploring structural inequalities affecting educational processes. Over the past decade, she has carried out research with various stakeholders across all levels of formal education and has engaged in academic work involving public forms of pedagogy in Latin America and the UK. Her current work explores how the future of education is being imagined and acted upon in the present as well as who participates (or not) in designing those imaginaries. Ultimately, her current research seeks to surface alternatives for reparative, fairer, and sustainable futures.
• Travis Van Isacker
  Travis Van Isacker is Senior Research Associate in the Centre's Moving domain. His research focuses on the implications of sociodigital border technologies on the movement of goods and people at the seaports of the Dover Straits. Before joining the Centre, Travis was Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Brighton where he taught a module on the criminology of borders. He also completed his PhD at Brighton with a project counter-mapping the evictions of migrants' homes and geographies of citizenship in Calais, France.

• Emma Atkins
  As a PhD student at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, Emma is exploring the relationship between society and technology. Her PhD project examines whether the design of the fridge - its size, shape, features and place in our homes and society - might be driving food out of our hands and into the bin. Using methods to look into the past, present and the future food storage habits, her research aims to uncover to what extent the fridge is complicit in food waste creation and rethink its design for a sustainable future.
• Jess Brand
  Jess Brand is a PhD student within the Centre. She investigates uses of predictive analytics in social welfare contexts within the UK, exploring the impact this has on how frontline professionals provide and perceive welfare services. Her project questions the extent to which this pre-emptive logic is distinct and indicative of a shift in the governance of, and care for, disadvantaged populations. It also centres the notion of technology as practice and seeks to investigate the kinds of pre-emptive data practices that might be emerging among practitioners such as social workers.
• Robbie James
  Robbie joined CenSoF as a PhD student in September 2023. He was previously a product manager in the tech industry and has an academic background in mathematical physics. His research looks at how narratives and visions of technology are constructed and integrated into our ideas of the future, eliciting changes in labour processes, investment and policy. His interests include digital labour platforms, the ‘metaverse’, teleoperated robotics and the use of 'generative artificial intelligence' in creative work.
• Edward Knight
  Edward Knight is PhD researcher, specialising in video game industry and cultures. With a deep-rooted passion for exploring the intersection of race, culture, and the dynamic realm of video games, Edward’s academic journey began with completing a BA (Hons) and MA with focus on video gaming and the Caribbean at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Currently, Edward’s research focuses on unravelling the intricate connections between race and video game narratives, exploring themes such as representation, employment, progression, identity formation, and the impact of racial stereotypes in virtual environments.
• Daren Okafo
  Daren’s work explores the broad conceptual space enabled by Afrofuturism, and its ability to open dialogues around time(s), meaning, race, coloniality and alternative modes of knowing/knowledge creation in the education technology sector. He is a critical adult educator and education technologist, who has worked in previously marginalized communities in rural Canada and across the globe for much of the last two decades. He is a technologist, digital artist, hip hop producer and a dedicated generalist with a deep connection to the land and sea in his home of Mi'kma'ki, also known as Nova Scotia.