Beckie Coleman and Susan Halford reflect on their trip to Naples in September to attend the RC33 conference.

One of the questions we are most often asked at CenSoF is, ‘how do you research sociodigital futures?’

Researching the ‘sociodigital’ is tricky! What methods can we deploy to explore how, where and when the social and the digital become so interwoven that they can no longer be fully disentangled? Taking this question seriously challenges the ontological, epistemological and ethical assumptions that underlie business as usual for research methods.

Conventionally, ‘technologies’ and ‘social life’ are treated as very different objects of inquiry, accessible through distinct methods, tied to different disciplines.

In fact, who can know about technology, on the one hand, or society, on the other – and how –  has long been embedded in an academic division of labour between engineering and the social sciences.

Social and digital entanglement

We now live in a world where the social and the digital are increasingly tightly entangled.

What then does that mean for the methods we need to investigate the sociodigital? Add ‘futures’ into the picture and it gets even more complicated.

Where better to dig into this question than at a research methods conference? With 500 delegates from all corners of Sociology? In September, in Naples?!

Way back in February it had been with some trepidation that CenSoF and our partners at the Southern Centre for Digital Transformation at Federico II, University of Naples proposed two sessions for the 11th International Sociological Association Conference on Social Science Methodology. We hoped that our agenda would strike a chord with the wider methods research community.

And, it did!

Record-breaking abstracts

Our session on ‘sociodigital methods’ convened by Biagio Aragona, Beckie Coleman and Susan Halford received more abstracts than any of the other 72 sessions across a varied conference programme.

Our questions clearly resonated, providing a shared space for researchers in different geographical and institutional settings to come together and grapple with shared concerns.

With limited space on the conference programme, we had to make hard choices about which papers to accept. In the end, we whittled it down to 12 excellent talks by speakers from Brazil, Italy, Sweden, the US and the UK.

These covered methods from autoethnography to topic modelling and named entity recognition, applied linguistics to speculative ethnography and experiments with Large Language Models.

They also brought together empirical fields of research from political mobilisation on social media to the use of predictive AI in child welfare (our own Debbie Watson), sociodigital work futures and commercial AI development.

It is hard to imagine these methods, topics and the ethical questions that they raise coming together at any other kind of conference! The shared focus on methods brought unlikely companions together and was hugely productive.

Pluralist methodology

Across and within the papers, a strong theme emerged about the importance of a pluralist methodology. That is, developing and mobilising different methods in conjunction – at the same time – to grasp the complexity of sociodigital phenomena.

We need to understand digital devices and data infrastructures together with everyday practices. This demands moving beyond social research methods and digital methods to the creation of sociodigital methods, which involves better known and barely known methods, from interviews, textual analysis and participatory approaches, to data analytics and computational techniques.

Alongside these sessions, CenSoF also ran a training session ‘Sociological engagements with Large Language Models’. Led by Jess Ogden (from Sociology ) and Les Carr (from Computer Science), this offered 25 conference participants a training session that alternated a critical introduction to the operations of LLMs with hands on experimentation.

Digital and data

Drawing in new computational techniques as a method for social research has been the subject of long standing debate in Sociology and Digital Methods.  CenSoF has a double take on this. First that digital, data and computational methods are important objects of inquiry for anyone interested in sociodigital futures.

What are these data, these operations, these infrastructures? And how are they embedded with social, political and economic relations? That is, how do we understand them as sociodigital?

Second, if and how might we use these data and techniques in our research, as ways of investigating sociodigital phenomena?

For example, how automated decision making shapes welfare decisions, or the consequences of next generation networks for digital inequality? What ethical and practical conundrums do they generate, and how should we address them?

The training session was an exemplary illustration of the approach that becomes possible at the inter (intra?!) section of disciplines; and just how essential this is for sociodigital futures research.

Overall, CenSoF x Naples was a hugely positive experience, culminating in a lively lunch with colleagues old and new at one of Naples’ many (wonderful) pizza restaurants. Our network has grown and will feed into a new edited collection ‘Sociodigital Futures Research Methods’. Watch this space!

Charisse Louw, South African researcher at Stellenbosch University, visited CenSoF over the summer and held a workshop exploring African cinema and embodied theory. In this guest blog she discusses the role of zombies as method. 

What if the zombie isn’t just a cinematic figure, but a method? A way of walking with the dead, tracing the residues of colonial extraction and racial capitalism in our digital infrastructures?

This was the animating thread behind my workshop and reading group on June 26th at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol. Titled Diffractive Methodologies for Sociodigital Futures, the session invited participants to feel their way through African cinema, embodied theory and black technopoetics. Here, the zombie became more than metaphor…it became method.

Why Zombies?

I hardly know. But they won’t leave me alone.

Zombies are archetypal figures that walk us into deep territory: histories, hauntings, systems of control, modes of resistance, and unexpected futures. They are ontological leaks, spectral labourers, glitching presences. In African cinematic imaginations, the zombie shifts from Western horror trope to ritual guide, mourning vessel, or encrypted body.

Zombies as methodology means reclaiming the undead not as collapse, but as refusal. It gestures toward unfinished liberation. It surfaces what dominant systems try to bury.

In the digital realm, zombies help us think about:

• Datafication of bodies and how the quantification of life creates a kind of digital zombification.
• Algorithmic control, where agency dissolves into systems that act without us.
• Digital hauntings in the persistence of one’s online past, spectral and sticky.

A zombie methodology invites us to move diffractively, through the interference patterns between memory, media, mineral and body.

Embodied Arrival

We began our time together not with slides or speech, but with somatic attunement. A Qi Gong sequence opened the body to relation, rhythm and breath. This was not a warm-up but a commitment: to be in inquiry with the body, not despite it.

We asked:

• Where does theory touch the body?
• How do digital media think with and through us?
• What kinds of world-making emerge when we attune to rhythm, breath and ancestral interference?

Drawing on bell hooks’s idea of theory as a site of healing, this was not scholarship-as-spectatorship, but scholarship-as-presence.

Diffractive Encounters with Film

Rather than analysing films for content or meaning, we used them as sensory fields for affective interference. Our film sequences included:

• I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), a gothic allegory of colonial haunting and Vodou cosmologies
• Atlantique (Mati Diop, 2019), a ghost love story of drowned migrants and haunted infrastructure
• Good Madam / Mlungu Wam (Jenna Cato Bass, 2021), a domestic horror unearthing spectral servitude and generational trauma
• Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025), an Afrofuturist vampire film where music opens portals across space-time

Participants were invited to respond not with interpretation, but with gesture, mapping, and shared reflection:

• What rhythms did the images activate in your breath or spine?
• Where did the image touch you?
• What did it awaken?

Reading Group: Fugitive Futures and Mineral Memories

Our afternoon session turned toward collective reading. Texts were approached as living archives, to be read aloud, rhythmically, and with breath. We engaged with:

• Ruha Benjamin on refusal as redirection and abolitionist imagination
• Neema Githere on Afropresentism and technology as ancestral portal
• Bayo Akomolafe on slowness as radical epistemology
• Katherine McKittrick on black methodologies as poetic refusal
• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on interactive archives and encrypted bodies
• Otobong Nkanga on mineral memory and the geologies of extractive grief

We asked:

• What future are you carrying in your body?
• What rhythms resist capture?
• What line haunts you still?

We read for texture, not mastery. For rhythm rather than argument and resistance over resolution.

Zombie as Diffractive Practice

To move like a zombie is to move through thresholds. Through syncopated time, spectral labour, and recursive presence. The zombie resists the linearity of technological progress narratives. It doesn’t march; it lurches, flickers, breaks rhythm.

As method, the zombie offers a deeply diffractive approach to sociodigital futures –

• It troubles boundaries between alive/dead, user/data, self/system
• It recodes media as haunted, not neutral
• It enacts a refusal of clean narratives, preferring mess, ambiguity, and entanglement

Zombies don’t walk in straight lines. Neither should we.

To CenSoF, thank you for the invitation and holding of this work. To all who brought their breath, questions and haunted traces to our gathering…this was not a workshop with answers, but a diffractive practice of feeling-with and I thank you for your courage and vulnerability.

Let us continue to ask not only what we know, but how we are moved.

Let the zombie walk with us…toward other rhythms, unfinished liberations and futures that glitch beautifully.

Thanks to the BSA New Materialisms Study Group, especially Prof Nick J Fox, the BSA Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group and CenSoF’s Debbie Watson, Charisse will be offering an online workshop on Monday 27 October . It’s free but requires online registration.

What comes to mind if someone asks you to draw some fruit? Or a fridge? Emma Atkins, PhD student at CenSoF researching fridge design and food waste, discusses insights from a recent food research workshop. 

In June, about 20 food geographers from around the country joined a two-day away day in Bristol. We visited a beautiful community garden and had workshops on how creative methods are used in food research, and I had the honour of organising the ice breaker. What came out of it was fascinating and made me reflect on where our food and food technology comes from – not just geographically, but historically as well.

I decided to organise a couple of rounds of ‘relay Pictionary’. It was like regular Pictionary – but a race between teams. We had four tables of around five people each, on which were some flipchart paper and marker pens. At the front of the room was a table with four piles of prompt cards, one for each table.

A participant from each table came up and picked up a prompt card, went back to their team and drew what was on the prompt card. When someone else on their team correctly guessed the prompt, another person on the team went to get the next prompt card from the front. This continued until the prompt cards ran out, at which point a team yelled ‘Pictionary’ and won the race.

The first round featured prompts all related to food items: bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables and so on. When the round was finished, I stuck the flip chart papers on the wall, so we could compare how each team drew the food items. I found it fascinating: everyone had drawn very similar images for each item of food.

Which fruit?

For fruit, every team drew an apple, and then most also drew a banana. Being in the UK, these are very common fruits people eat, and the teams had drawn them in almost identical ways.

Similarly, carrots were drawn for the prompt of ‘vegetables’ on every paper: another common food product in the UK, with a distinctive shape.

It was discussed that being in the UK for this exercise meant that certain food items were understood in a certain way: if we were in, say, South Asia or West Africa, would ‘vegetable’ look very different? How would people understand the prompt ‘fruit’ and what items would be the most simplest incarnation to draw?

We discussed how these are the kinds of food items people draw when under pressure, and when they want other people to understand exactly what they mean. Participants noted that they reached for the very simplest and most baseline images of food that they could think of, while also making them recognisable.

For example, it was observed that although there are many types of cheese, it is hard to differentiate between them easily, so the stereotypical ‘Swiss cheese’, triangular in shape and with holes in it, was used to make this drawing as clear as possible.

Cheese please

When asked about why this was *the* cheese stereotype, participants pondered about how cheeses in cartoons are drawn, in children’s books and on TV. That begs the question: how did this type of cheese become so prevalent in cartoons? Where do all these archetypal images come from, and at what point did they become the archetypes?

For the second round of Pictionary participants drew kitchen objects, including the fridge, the toaster, the microwave, and the hob. Again, participants drew very similar drawings for these objects.

One of the conceptual frameworks I am using for my PhD is called Science and Technology Studies (STS). It concerns itself with how science is ‘made’ and how technology comes to be. There are numerous examples of how certain objects and knowledges arose not simply because they were ‘the best’ but because of other compounding factors.

From icebox to fridge

A good example is the refrigerator. In her piece ‘How the refrigerator got its hum’ (1983), Ruth Cowan Schwartz details that the electric compression fridge ‘won’ against the gas absorption fridge not because the technology was necessarily superior, but because of the national rollout of domestic electricity networks by President Roosevelt, the size and influence of electric utility companies, and the aggressive marketing tactics of the electric fridge manufacturers. Without these factors, we may well have gas instead of electric fridges in our kitchens.

The drawings of the fridge made me reflect on this research: in another world, how would our fridges look different? The design of the fridge is indebted to the icebox, which was patented in the USA in 1838 (Gantz 2015). When manufacturers were creating the electric refrigerator, they didn’t want to stray too far from the familiar icebox design – they were already asking their consumers to give up a comfortable piece of technology for a relatively unknown entity.

Keeping the ‘box’ made the move to an electric fridge easier, even though it may not be the ‘best’ design for storing food. Studies (including my own) are showing that having deep shelves and drawers can make food more at risk of going off if it remains hidden from view and more easily forgotten.

Smart fridges

Some designs in the mid-20^th century attempted to move away from the traditional ‘box’ design, but they were not successful; and although food waste is now high on the agenda, fridge manufacturers seem to simply be heaping on more digital gadgets (like cameras and smart screens) onto the same boxy hardware. Will we move away from the ‘box’ one day? What would this Pictionary round look like in the future?

The Pictionary icebreaker was a great tool of bringing out the archetypes of food and food-related objects, and made participants consider why these archetypes exist. Other workshops that feature mundane objects and things, or STS-related themes, would benefit from this exercise. It was also rather playful and I hope it made everyone relax and feel more comfortable participating in the subsequent workshops.

References

Cowan, R. S., 1983. How the refrigerator got its hum. In: MacKenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (eds), 1985. The Social Shaping of Technology. pp. 202-218

Gantz, C., 2015. Refrigeration: A History. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company.

How do older adults and AgeTech industries imagine future ageing-technology? Miguel Gomez-Hernandez, researcher at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University who visited CenSof this summer, examines the debates around smart-home technology futures focused on trust, repair, and fall risks.

There’s a common narrative driving much of the technology designed “for” older people. Industry imagines an ageing population growing rapidly, accompanied by a shortage of caregivers.

In response, the industry predicts a future where older adults will be increasingly surrounded and cared for by smart systems, assistive robots, companion devices, surveillance tools, and AI-powered platforms designed to monitor and manage daily life.

This vision is often driven by urgency: ageing is framed as a demographic crisis that must be solved through technological innovation.

These assertions are based on my interviews with industry experts, drawing on comic scenarios, after a review of industry reports, and published here. But older adults don’t necessarily see their futures this way as my research with older adults in Melbourne demonstrate.

Both methods form the basis of my PhD based at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Monash University (Australia) with Prof. Sarah Pink as lead supervisor.

In my household visits with older adults – drawing on video-tours and GenAI scenarios – I found rich, nuanced reflections that resist this binary framing of technology as either salvation or intrusion. Most older people I met do not simply accept or reject technology. Instead, their relationship to it is shaped by trust, repair, and anxieties. These are not binary positions – they exist on a spectrum, shaped by personal histories, imaginations, and priorities, and broader social concerns.

Trust in technologies

One recurring theme is trust. Older adults are not passive users waiting for technology to “assist” them. The idea of being constantly monitored or managed by machines, without choice or flexibility, raises serious questions about trust.

Many express concern over loss of agency, privacy, or being forced to adapt to systems they didn’t ask for. This relation to mistrust and trust is about feeling confidence, control, and security in their future.

Who will repair breakages?

Interestingly, participants also expressed fears about the possible breakage of technology,  that don’t usually appear in tech-centred companies, while enacting and showing me ways they would repair them.

Many questioned what happens when these technologies break down, asking who will maintain the technologies when they inevitably break? How will power outages or natural disasters impact the future smart home – without reliable backup systems – where older adults are envisaged to live independently?

These questions reveal a broader awareness of and concern around the fragility of technology – a recognition that the future is not just a place of progress, but also of vulnerability that we need to embrace.

Risk of falls

And then there is the question of the anxieties over the risk of future falls —an ever-present fear in later life. More than just a physical and metrified event followed by growing frailty as typically depicted through biomedical perspectives, it represents a turning point: the moment that can lead to institutionalisation, a move to a new home, or the loss of independence.

While technology companies monitor and quantify older people’s lives offering solutions such as sensors, alarms, or the removal of carpets and stairs to prevent risks, older adults are reluctant to instrumentalise fall risks since falls are an inevitable and pervasive hazard. They imagine fall risks as entangled with economic constraints, housing insecurity, cultural differences, and home objects and pets, often anticipating transitions with ambivalence or anxiety.

Design with care

My research investigates dominant industry and older adults’ visions, and urges us to take older adults’ imaginations seriously. They are not merely end-users or “beneficiaries” of innovation. They are experts in their own lives, actively imagining and shaping their own futures.

If we truly want to design inclusive futures for older adults, we must listen more closely and participate in the lives of older adults – not just to design a set of design requirements, but to how they resist and envision with hope the years to come.

As my PhD dissertation is expected to be submitted in January 2026, I hope to report back to my participants, strengthen collaborations with the AgeTech industry and researchers, and develop joint research around AgeTech futures with the ETLab, CenSoF, and more.

By Jenny L. Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair and Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University

Algorithmic bias is a perpetual problem. It is a problem rooted in history, manifesting in the present, and shaping the future into troubling form. This is not a problem with a technical fix, a box to be ticked, nor obvious actors to blame. It’s diffuse, entrenched, and the subject of significant attention.

That attention, framed through the prism of ‘fairness’, has not been especially effective, if effectiveness is measured in a greater justice and less harm. With each new advance—automated decision systems, facial recognition, generative AI—social stratifications replicate, amplify, and scale.

The fairness paradigm isn’t working. It’s time for something else. Here, I pose algorithmic reparation as an orienting framework and worldbuilding project, displacing fairness in favour of redress. This draws from a burgeoning movement across fields and domains.

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