Current Research Projects (a selection)
As all scholars I know, I am currently juggling several research projects, but the three below are furthest along, meaning, closest to being submitted to journals for publication.
What Is Human Intelligence in the Age of AI?
With Marta Blazquez Cano from the University of Manchester. We are interviewing fashion designers about how they use AI in their creative process. The central question is: what new value can designers offer in a new creative process when AI plays such a central role in it?
Speculative Futures and the Commons
With Patrick Elf (Middlesex University) and Jaron Rowan (BAU Barcelona), this project asks creative workers to imagine speculative futures for shared cultural and creative resources - the commons - as a counterfactual to privately owned AI systems.
How Do Censored Professionals Respond to Algorithmic Stigma on X (Twitter)?
With Alessandro Tirapani from Tilburg University in The Netherlands and Lucas Amaral from IESEG in Paris, this project looks at professionals who are shadow-banned; flagged by a platform's algorithm as violating unstated rules; and how they navigate the impact of a faceless system on their work and social media strategy.
Current PhD Students
PhD students are central to any research group, they bring innovative and cutting edge research questions to an existing portfolio, and, time in their hands for deep focus on research projects! (As a scholar, we are often multi-tasking between research, teaching and leadership; which can be a creativity killer, PhD students are pretty much research focused which is an intellectual bliss!) .
I currently supervise two working on digital innovation in fashion:
Karinna Grant researches digital collective ownership in luxury fashion, examining how ownership, as a social construct, is being reshaped in digital contexts.
Jean Noonan is examining the "AI-for-sustainability" narrative in fashion's value chain, looking beyond efficiency gains at the industry level to the wider systemic environmental impact of AI adoption.