Ash Watson is a sociologist and writer based in Sydney, Australia.
A former doctoral Endeavour Research Fellow, she is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vitalities Lab at the University of New South Wales. She researches digital technologies, fiction and zines using ethnographic and creative qualitative methods. This work focuses on cultural meaning, aesthetics, DIY practices and storytelling. Her PhD was awarded in late 2018.
Her debut novel Into the Sea was published in June 2020 in Brill’s award-winning Social Fictions Series. Her scholarly writing has appeared in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Qualitative Research, and Sociological Research Online, and her creative writing has appeared in Overland, SCUM Mag, and Bareknuckle Poet.
Ash runs So Fi Zine, a project dedicated to open-access, experimental and creative social research. She is the invited inaugural editor of Fiction at The Sociological Review and co-lead of the popular feminist arts/research workshop series Affect, Knowledge and Embodiment. She also runs Frances St Press, an indie zine publisher.
Tweet @awtsn or email ashleigh.watson [at] unsw.edu.au.
Subscribe to her sociological fiction substack here.
