Researcher

I have spent over a decade in academic research, beginning with a research assistant post at the University of Sheffield (UK) which turned into a PhD in Infrastructure Futures & Theory, and culminated in a number of postdoctoral projects in southern Sweden, including a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship undertaken at Lund University.

As part of my doctoral research, I spent five years thinking very hard about how change happens: about the inextricable social and technological conditions for change, and the interacting drivers thereof. This question of change is, for me, the central question of all futures and foresight work: no change means no difference, which means no future.

In my postdoctoral work, my focus shifted, as I picked up the creative and quantitative approaches to thinking about (infrastructure) futures from my PhD, and developed them into a methodology known as “narrative prototyping” for exploring and communicating climate futures. Many of my academic publications are open-access and linked directly from this website; you can also see my citation scores and other metrics on my G**gle Scholar profile.

For almost as long as I was an academic, I was also doing commercial and fourth-sector (i.e. non-profit) work as a consulting researcher, often (but not always) on futures-focussed projects; it is to this sort of work that I am once again turning my hand, through my company Magrathea Framtider AB. Some examples of my research work can be seen below.


Researcher