BA (Hons) (UKC), MA (Manchester), PhD (UKC)
,
Anthropology
2019
Sarah Pink is Professor and founding Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. She has an international reputation for her work as an interdisciplinary anthropologist, and holds visiting Professorships in Loughborough University, UK and Halmstad University, Sweden. Her research often engages directly and collaboratively with disciplines and stakeholder organisations that seek to address key societal issues (including design, engineering and arts and creative practice), to ensure that social sciences knowledge about human, societal and environmental wellbeing is accounted for in futures-focused research. She frequently gives keynote and public lectures at academic and business conferences and events internationally and has many publications, details of which can be found on her google scholar page.
Most recently Sarah has pioneered design anthropological approaches to Emerging Technologies, and in 2018 established the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. This area of her work focuses on how Artificial Intelligence, automation, and digital data are experienced in everyday life, and how we can ensure that they become part of responsible and ethical futures. Her current and recent projects use visual, sensory and design ethnographic techniques to investigate these and other questions through interdisciplinary research across three areas:
Future Transport Mobilities: autonomous driving vehicles; mobile technologies in everyday commuting; Mobility as a Service; the experience of motorway noise transformation
Digital Energy Futures: developing new energy demand forecasting methods through qualitative futures research
Personal data and technologies: self-tracking and wearable technologies, smart phone and mobile technology use in everyday life, and personal technology futures; understanding digital assets and data anxieties
Health and wellbeing: health care technologies in homes and hospital environments; occupational health and safety in the construction industry and health care; hospital buildings, interior and service design; and the slow movement and urban living.
Sarah is moreover known internationally for her leadership in visual anthropology and in innovative research methodologies. Her current focus involves developing research approaches and techniques for creating new qualitative understandings of futures. She has pioneered the fields of visual ethnography, sensory ethnography (collaboratively) digital ethnography, and impact-focused design ethnography, and futures anthropology. She has also developed new design anthropological dissemination and impact techniques, including design ethnographic videomaking. She engages and further advances methods in interdisciplinary projects with design, engineering and creative practice disciplines. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Brazil and Indonesia.
Professor of Design and Emerging Technology, Faculty of Information Technology and Monash Art, Design and Architecture, Melbourne, Australia (2018 – present)
International Guest Professor, Information Technology Department, Halmstad University, Sweden (2017 – present)
Visiting Professor, Loughborough University Design School, UK. (2018 – present)
Fellow of the Loughborough University Institute of Advanced Studies, UK. (2019 – present )
Adjunct Professor, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia (2018 – 2021)
1. Pink, S. (2013) Doing Visual Ethnography. Revised and expanded 3rd edition, London: Sage
2. Pink, S. (2012) Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places, London: Sage.
3. Pink, S. and J. F. Salazar (2017) ‘Anthropologies and Futures: setting the agenda’ in J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving and J. Sjoberg (eds) Future Anthropologies. Oxford: Bloomsbury.
4. Pink, S., K. Leder Mackley, R. Morosanu, V. Mitchell and T. Bhamra (2017) Making Homes: ethnographies and designs. Oxford: Bloomsbury
5. Akama, Y., S. Pink and S. Sumartojo (2018) Uncertainty and Possibility: new approaches to future making. London: Bloomsbury.