Researcher, strategist, and practitioner working across civic AI governance, participatory storytelling, and regenerative placemaking.
For over twenty years, my work has been guided by a single question: who gets to decide what value technological systems create?
I came to this question through sound. My PhD examined real-time city technologies reimagined as connection points to the "real times of space" — using ambient sound archives to create mobile listening experiences that reveal contested spatial histories. That early work in experimental public history and speculative archival practice set the coordinates for everything that followed.
In 2019, I published Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities with Palgrave Macmillan. The book examines how digital platforms restructure urban life, public services, and civic participation — and asks what alternative platform models might look like when designed for public value rather than private extraction. It has been cited over 500 times.
The research has since moved from platforms to AI. I currently hold a Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University, focused on civic AI governance — tracing the arc from platform urbanism to place-based approaches to AI sovereignty. The fellowship asks how Indigenous data sovereignty, embodied knowledge, and community participation can reshape AI governance frameworks at the local, national, and international scale.
Through Studio ESEM (founded 2011), I work with cultural institutions, councils, and communities to build participatory digital infrastructure. The studio sits at the intersection of research, strategy, and making — every project is both a practical intervention and a research contribution.
The studio's signature project is STORYBOX — a civic digital storytelling platform that deploys outdoor exhibition infrastructure for community voice. Since 2020, STORYBOX has been used by partners including ABC, the Australian Museum, the National Gallery of Australia, UNSW, and Canterbury Bankstown Council, building on over 40 placemaking programs delivered since 2013.
I also publish Civic Interplay, a research publication exploring the intersections of civic technology, AI governance, and participatory democracy.
Across all of this work — the scholarship, the studio practice, the writing — runs what I think of as a long-form narrative inquiry into how digital systems reshape place, citizenship, and collective governance. I have described this elsewhere as "golden threads structuring space through time," resisting what I call the actuarial colonisation of the unknown.
I am currently working on a new book, Still Here, structured as a topographical excavation of sites through modes of encounter — listening, reading, installing, diagnosing, gathering, letting go — with first-person interjections providing connective tissue across two decades of published work.
I'm based in Sydney, Australia. Beyond research, I maintain a body-based practice through Pilates, yoga, cycling, and dance — and a long-standing interest in deep-time writing as a grounding counterweight to the accelerationist logics of the systems I study.