Biography

Currently I am studying trouble-making in public places, service encounters in cafes, assistance dog training (with Jamie Arathoon), visually impaired persons using assistive technology (with Daniel Muñoz) and interaction in the great outdoors. Fairly recently, I was the PI on a project funded by Nissan Research with Barry Brown, Daniel Muñoz and Rebekah Miller on cross-cultural studies of car communication in traffic. There are a number of unfunded projects I have been working on: autonomous vehicles with Barry Brown; comics as research with Shari Shabeti, family mealtimes with Sally Wiggins. navigation in the countryside with Tom Smith, Stuart Reeves and Ria Dunkley. Although officially completed, as is the way with university research projects, I worked on the Internet of Second Hand Things, funded by the EPSRC, with Chris Speed (PI), Mark Hartswood and Siobhan Magee and the principal investigator on 'Assembling the line: amateur & professional work, skills and practice in digital video editing', working together with Barry Brown & Ignaz Strebel the ESRC funded 'Habitable cars: the organisation of collective private transport' with Barry Brown & Hayden Lorimer.

Alongside this I organise the Scottish Ethnomethodology, Discourse, Interaction & Technology group (SEDIT) with Sue Widdicombe and various activities of the Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group at the School of Geosciences, Edinburgh. Previously I was the PI on 'The Cappuccino Community: Cafes and Civic Life in the Contemporary City', carried out with Chris Philo, and before that I had an Urban Studies Research Fellowship which allowed me to pursue research on community practices in the city. The latter drew on ethnographic fieldwork on neighborhoods and community in an Edinburgh suburb as part of the Living Memory Project. From 1997 onwards I was the principal researcher on an ESRC funded project: 'Meet You At Junction 17: a socio-technical and spatial study of the mobile office', again with Chris Philo as a co-applicant. In the past I ran the Scottish Ethnomethodology Reading Group with Stanley Raffel for seven years and data sessions at Glasgow & Edinburgh University with Barry Brown for seven years.