Hi, I'm Sarah Barns.
Researcher, strategist, and founder of Studio ESEM and STORYBOX.CO. I work across civic AI governance, participatory storytelling, and regenerative placemaking. Author of Platform Urbanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Currently a Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. PhD in public history.
- AI Sovereignty and the Westphalian Collision
On Dario Amodei's 'Adolescence of Technology' essay and what the Anthropic-Pentagon standoff reveals about a collision between emergent AI sovereignty and the Westphalian state.
- Gathering Intelligences: Designing for Multi-Species Encounter
How we built a six-movement workshop format grounded in Indigenous data sovereignty and Country-centred methods — and what happened when we ran it.
- Her Place: Safety, Gender, and Public Space
Notes on designing a STORYBOX program around women's perceptions of safety in public spaces — for the NSW Safer Cities grant.
- Community Walls and Digital Commons
Deploying STORYBOX at the Inner West Museum of Rugby League — QR codes, Cloudflare Workers, and what civic storytelling actually looks like when it's live.
- Still Here: Excavating Sites of Encounter
Early notes on a book structured as topographical excavation — six modes of encounter (listening, reading, installing, diagnosing, gathering, letting go) across twenty years of work.
- From Platform Urbanism to Civic AI
Tracing the arc from my 2019 monograph to the ARC Future Fellowship — what changed, what persists, and why place-based governance matters more than ever.
- Seeing the Whole Picture: AI-Assisted Evaluation in the Kimberley
A concept for AI-assisted evaluation methodology to track cross-agency investment in remote Indigenous communities — First Nations-led, place-centred.
- The Long Goodbye Studio
Building a workshop around AI's material footprint — e-waste, energy, water — and what circular economy storytelling could look like.
- The Civic AI Readiness Gap
Why local governments aren't ready for AI — and a framework for assessing civic AI readiness that starts with place rather than procurement.
- Real Times of Space: Revisiting the PhD
Returning to the ideas behind my doctoral work — ambient sound archives, mobile listening experiences, and contested spatial histories as experimental public history.