Dr Ash Watson

Dr Ash Watson is a sociologist and Senior Research Fellow at UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on the relationships between technology and culture, and examines the impacts of digital innovation and change on belonging, wellbeing and inclusion. Her previous research examined people's understandings of personal data including health information and the everyday impacts of digital technologies during COVID-19. She is a fellow of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and a member of the UNSW AI Institute.

Ash has an international profile for her innovative methodological scholarship which shows the value of creative and digital/computational methods for qualitative sociology. She is an invited Editorial Board Member of Qualitative Research and Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review. She leads the creative project So Fi Zine, an open-access publication for sociological experiments in the form of flash fiction, poetry and visual art which she first launched in 2017. Her debut novel Into the Sea was published by Brill in 2020. She makes zines at Frances St Press.