Ash Watson

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Verified

Ash verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Scientia Fellow and Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney

This article presents a creative direction for public sociology: novel writing. Narrativity is embedded within much contemporary sociological work, and sociologists and novelists share a number of complementary approaches for understanding and interpreting the social world. This article argues that novel writing presents sociologists with a process...

This article introduces a technique for doing mixed-methods research which I term the methods braiding technique. Contributing to established techniques for mixing methods across and within the quantitative and qualitative spectra, methods braiding incorporates arts-based research considerations. This aims to assist the growing number of researcher...

Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software...

The value of fiction for public sociology and within qualitative research is well established. However, questions about process remain. Drawing from three contemporary projects – a novel, a series of short stories, and a collection of micro-fiction – this article focuses methodological attention on how sociological imagination may be crafted in and...

The rise of crowdsourced and participatory digital platforms which aim to make visible the experiences of otherwise marginalised people are significant within the broader landscape of digitally mediated community spaces. One example of such media is Queering the Map, a digital storymapping platform where users anonymously pin ‘queer moments’ and me...

Spark by Patricia Leavy follows Sociology Professor Peyton Wilde as she travels to remote Iceland to participate in a mysterious scholarly seminar. Set in a moody grand manor with an enigmatic host and an eclectic cast of characters, the story blends intellectual intrigue with personal discovery and highlights the strength of Leavy’s social fiction...

Vibes are having a moment and academics seem increasingly serious about understanding whatever the vibe is. Many qualitative methodological approaches are already very vibey. This is especially true of those that engage with affects and atmospheres, social and sociotechnical imaginaries, and materialisms and the more-than-human. In this article, I...

Emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision‐making (ADM) promise to advance many industries. Healthcare is a key locus for new developments, where operational improvements are magnified by the bigger‐picture promise of improved care and outcomes for patients. Forming the zeitgeist of contemporary sociotechnical inno...

How we elicit rich reflections from people about their feelings and experiences is a central consideration of qualitative research. Creative techniques of elicitation can open reflective dialogic spaces between participants and researchers, bridging memory and meaning. In this article we discuss participant-led explorations of a digital story-mappi...

Queering the Map ( queeringthemap.com ) is a novel digital platform: a storymap, an anonymous collaborative record, an archive of queer experiences. To contribute to the platform, visitors make their own mark by clicking on an empty space on the map. As to what visitors contribute, the platform’s About section suggests, simply, ‘If it counts for yo...

Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has ta...

Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies is a study into how people make sense of health information and how they understand the connections between their health, wellbeing, community and world.

There are numerous ways that researchers can creatively approach social research and translation. This article discusses elements from the first stages of a novel project that centres social research translation in the form of a public exhibition. 'Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies' is a project by a multidisciplinary research tea...

This chapter focuses on the lively, alternative publishing landscape of zine culture. Zines are small independent publications of writing, visual art and/or other creative work that resist and play with mainstream publishing. Zines celebrate a DIY ethos and circulate via fairs, postal networks, online platforms, alternative bookstores and library o...

A zine made from a workshop involving using creative arts-based methods to think through, problematise and contest imaginaries and practices of automated care, and to develop future-oriented ideas about possibilities for better automated care.

With pandemic conditions and social distancing disrupting traditional research methods, the COVID-19 pandemic has left many researchers turning to digital and creative methods, perhaps for the first time. Despite the significant challenges qualitative researchers have faced during the pandemic, this chapter considers what potentials these condition...

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude makes the magical and strange feel familiar, and short stories from Fiction @ The Sociological Review inversely make the familiar feel strange. I consider this ability to make the familiar strange as a key part of having a sociological sense of the world: as an ability to disturb what seems fix...

In this article, we present ideas about developing innovative methods for the sociology of futures. Our approach brings together the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of futures with vital materialism theories and research-creation methods. We draw on our research-creation materials from a series of online workshops. The wo...

People’s ideas and practices concerning their personal data and digital privacy have received growing attention in social inquiry. In this article, we discuss findings from a study that adopted the story completion method together with a theoretical perspective building on feminist materialism to explore how people make sense of and respond to digi...

Restrictions on physical movements and in-person encounters during the COVID-19 crisis confronted many qualitative researchers with challenges in conducting and completing projects requiring face-to-face fieldwork. An exploration of engaging in what we term ‘agile research’ in such circumstances can offer novel methodological insights for researchi...

Personal digital data are often imagined and experienced as invisible and immaterial phenomena, albeit with increasingly powerful impacts on people’s lives. In this article we discuss findings from an ethnographic project involving 30 participants in Sydney, Australia, directed at identifying their practices and understandings concerning their home...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture provides a comprehensive and fully up-to-date overview of key themes and debates relating to the academic study of popular music and youth culture. While this is a highly popular and rapidly expanding field of research, there currently exists no single-source reference book for those intere...

Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have meant that the home was requisitioned as a primary site for work for many people. In this article, we draw...

This article explores the meaning and materiality of contemporary zines. As do-it-yourself and profit-resistant publications seeing a sustained resurgence, zines are an interesting and valuable case within the cultural sociology of reading. Based on a thematic analysis of 73 zines collected from a 2019 zine fair, and qualitative interviews with 16...

This paper adds to recent discussions of young people’s porn literacy and argues that researchers must address porn users’ engagements with, and understandings of, different porn genres and practices. As part of a larger interdisciplinary project which consisted of a series of systematic reviews of literature on the relationship between pornography...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake in affiliation information for authors Katerina Litsou and Roger Ingham.

The Editorial for Volume 6, Issue 1: Fiction as Research: Writing Beyond the Boundary Lines.

The Preface and Introduction chapter for The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach. Design/methodology/approach The story completion method was brought together with D...

As the number of digital technologies expands, entering more domains of everyday life, people’s activities, bodies and preferences are rendered into constantly changing flows of digitised information. The interdisciplinary field of critical data studies has emerged in response. In this article, we outline the design and development of methods emplo...

Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, where notions of flexibility and technological development inform institutional systems and strategies. This article presents results from an Australian study on redesigning and delivering an introductory sociology course using a combination of such model...

Taylah Brown is happy. She is. She has graduated university and she is in love and Sydney is a wonderful city to be in love in – all sunshine and blue water everywhere. It’s 2014 and the future is paved out in front her, a heat shimmer of possibility. Haircuts. Concerts. Holidays. Birthdays. Getting engaged, being engaged, going to brunch to show o...

Spark, a social research novel by Patricia Leavy, innovatively explores the complexities of doing collaborative, complex research. The story follows Sociology Professor Peyton Wilde during a week-long research seminar in Iceland with, as her invitation reads, "some of the greatest thinkers of our time." With an intriguing setup, swift plotline and...