Ash Watson is a sociologist and writer in Sydney, Australia.
A postdoctoral fellow at the Vitalities Lab, UNSW Sydney, Ash uses creative qualitative methods to research how people make sense of and with their personal data technologies now and for the future. She is a former postgraduate Endeavour Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD in Sociology was awarded by Griffith University in late 2018. A key output of her doctoral research is a Spinozist novel, forthcoming with Brill in 2020. Her work focuses on temporality, aesthetics and storytelling to explore how things become meaningful to us, collectively.
Ash is the creator and editor of So Fi Zine, an open access publication for creative social science. The zine has a wide international contributor pool, and has featured invited writing by Howard Becker, Raewyn Connell, Les Back, Nirmal Puwar, Michael Burawoy, Patricia Leavy and other internationally leading sociologists. She is also the invited inaugural editor of The Sociological Review‘s online fiction series, publishing high-quality short stories that imaginatively extend sociology’s study of society into fiction.
Her creative writing has appeared in Overland, SCUM, Bareknuckle Poet, BrainDrip and more. Her zines have featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zine Fair (part of Sydney Writers Festival), the National Young Writers’ Festival Zine Fair, and OtherWorlds.
Ash is the elected Secretary (2019-2020) for The Australian Sociological Association.
Tweet @awtsn or email ashleigh.watson@unsw.edu.au.
