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Ash Watson

I am a sociologist and Scientia Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. My research examines the social and cultural impacts of emerging technologies. I study the unequal impacts of AI, the importance of civic cultural spaces like archives and libraries, and who gets to write the story of our digital future.

I am especially interested in creative methods and queer feminist work. I am Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review, a quarterly series of sociological short stories published with the UK’s oldest sociology journal. I make/edit So Fi Zine, a twice-yearly publication for flash fiction, poetry, visual art & all experimental forms of creative social inquiry. My debut novel, Into the Sea, was published by Brill in 2020. I run the indie zine publisher/distro Frances Street Press and am part of the AKE Zine team.

I have held a number of visiting positions including with The University of Glasgow (2025), the ESRC Centre for SocioDigital Futures at the University of Bristol (2023), and Goldsmiths, University of London as a Doctoral Endeavour Research Fellow (2017). I am an Affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellent for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

My grants and publications are listed here.

Contact me via email at ashleigh.watson@unsw.edu.au. Subscribe for sociological fiction news via awtsn.substack.com.

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