Ash Watson is an Australian sociologist and writer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A former doctoral Endeavour Research Fellow, she is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vitalities Lab working on an ARC-funded project exploring how people make sense of/with digital technologies now and for the future. She is an internationally-recognised leader in creative public sociology for her work with fiction and zine making. Her research program focuses on the relationships between social (and sociotechnical) imaginaries, cultural meaning, aesthetics and storytelling.
Her debut novel Into the Sea, published in June 2020 in Brill’s award-winning Social Fictions Series, critically examines the promises and fictions of dominant cultural narratives like ‘the Australian Way of Life’. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Qualitative Research, Cultural Sociology and Sociological Research Online, and her creative writing has appeared in Overland, SCUM Mag, and Bareknuckle Poet.
Ash is the creator and editor of So Fi Zine, an independent open-access publication for arts and social science cross-disciplinary work, and the invited inaugural editor of Fiction at The Sociological Review. She is the 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.
