About
Dr Alison Powell is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE and serves as Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications (Data and Society).
Alison’s work concerns knowledge politics in the context of social and ecological transition. Occupying disciplinary edges between communication studies, STS and social theory, Alison combines a focus on narrative and discourse with considerations of material politics, intervening in both through a range of empirical and creative work. Alison’s current research project engages with the knowledge politics underpinning technology-driven visions of the future, presenting alternative visions and practices in everyday contexts including health, education and public participation. It explores new social theory and praxis for social and environmental transition that considers knowledge politics in relation to the politics of land and water. For Alison, epistemic justice is related to climate and racial justice.
Alison’s participatory research practice of data walking is widely used in public consultation, teaching, and community research worldwide. Alison also contributed to the interdisciplinary, participatory project Rewilding The Night. The book Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities was published with Yale University Press in 2021, and other past projects have concerned knowledge politics in open-source software production and the development of explainable AI systems, as well as the role of emotions as a complicating factor in data-driven public consultation.
From 2019 to 2023, Alison was the Director of the JUST AI network, supported by the Ada Lovelace Institute and the UKRI, which used network methods and convening to introduce new voices and topics into data and AI ethics research across the UK. Other research partners have included Projects by IF and the Open Rights Group, and research funding has come from Horizon Europe, the AHRC, the US Social Science Research Council, the Human Data Interactions Network (EPSRC), and the Open Society Foundations. Alison has advised the Africa Just AI project and the Operationalising Ethics for AI project.
Alison joined the Department in 2010 as an LSE Fellow, and was previously a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Canada Graduate Scholar at Concordia University (PhD), and a Rogers Scholar at Toronto Metropolitan University (MA). Prior to academia, Alison worked in the film and TV industry producing new media.
Expertise
Climate Futures; Epistemic Justice; Participatory Research; Creative Methods; Public Participation; Technology in Health and Care; Civic Technology; Transition; Alternatives to Capitalism
Dr Powell has a Bachelor’s degree in Canadian Literature, extensive training in Science and Technology Studies and critical theory, and many years of field experience working with technical cultures as well as producing creative and collaborative research work. Her PhD (2008) is from Concordia University’s Communication Studies Programme.
Research
Alison’s work concerns aspects of epistemic justice, ethics, expertise and knowledge politics in technology design. It can be practical, speculative or interventionist, seeking to explore and generate alternatives within the design, regulation and institutional practices associated with technology. Using social scientific, creative and participatory methods, Alison's work foregrounds creativity and participation as essential components of research that can generate alternatives for digital futures. Research outputs beyond academic articles, books and chapters have included poems, , speculative fiction and performance, and Alison has appeared on BBC radio, Talk TV and at the Museum of London, among many public engagements.
Current Research
Alison’s current research concerns the relationship between discourse and design of technology, through a project called Deceptive Stories of Technology (and what to do about them). The project asks: What is the significance of stories told about technology? Who tells them, and how do certain interests get designed into things like AI devices, while others aren’t considered? What potential is there for other stories to be told, heard, and acted upon within organizations, especially public sector organizations? Several research strands include:
- Research on the way that data-driven public consultation can alienate public participation and contribute to political polarization addresses these questions using the case of Low-Traffic Neighbourhood planning.
- Research on start-up interventions into the UK National Health Service reveals how challenges to epistemic justice are evident in conflicts over scale, time, and the meaning of evidence.
- The development of sociotechnical principles including reciprocity, temporality and repairability to address epistemic injustices and other inequalities. Opportunities to develop and test these can come from research and practice developed with communities, public sector and public interest organizations.
Other Research
Digital futures
Undoing Optimization: Civic Action and Smart Cities, published by Yale University Press (2021) argues that ‘techno-systemic frames’ shaped by powerful actors shape what kinds of civic actions are possible. The book outlines the history of the ‘smart city’ since 2001, including commercial and radical iterations, and concludes by imagining a transformed vision of ‘smartness’ and citizenship.
‘How Can Anyone Be More than One Thing’– uses the ‘more-than-human’ to consider rights, justice and equality in urban settings, employing an exchange of letters and two pieces of speculative fiction to explore ideas of ‘otherness’. This writing formed part of the MoTH project: More-than-Human Data Interactions in Smart Cities.
"Rewilding the Night"re-imagines how, where, and why we choose to utilise artificial illumination, using ‘smart’ lighting prototyping as an opportunity to imagine and build more just, sustainable and ethical urban spaces. This project involved collaborating with astronomers, lighting designers, philosophers and architects to re-consider the social construction of darkness in relation to justice and flourishing.
Data and AI Ethics
The JUST AI Network: Joining Up Society and Technology for AI, supported by the AHRC and the Ada Lovelace Institute, transformed data and AI ethics research in the UK. JUST AI created alternative ethical spaces, practices and orientations towards the issue of data and AI ethics within a broad community of practice, introducing questions of sustainability of AI infrastructure and rights, access and refusal.
‘Data walking’integrates performance, reflection and collaborative knowledge production to investigate data infrastructure and its social consequences. Data walking formed part of the artistic research project Museum of Contemporary Commoditiesin 2018 and is widely used in teaching, research and public consultation worldwide.
Technology Futures
The , funded by the EU H2020 programme , examined ways to explore ethics in practice among Internet of Things developer communities and responsible innovation, and the Technology for Good movement.
The , funded by the Open Society Foundations considered the possibility and consequences of explaining how algorithms work. Understanding Automated Decisions also culminated in an interactive research exhibit in the LSE Gallery exploring public reflections on interface design for explanation.
Teaching
Postgraduate teaching
Dr Powell is programme director for the MSc Media and Communications (Data and Society), and convenes and teaches on the postgraduate courses Digital Media Futures and Data in Communication and Society.
She has also contributed lectures to team-taught postgraduate Media and Communications courses relating to theories and concepts (MC408/MC418) and research methodologies (MC4M1/MC4M2).
Doctoral supervision
Dr Powell supervises doctoral researchers and welcomes applications from prospective students relating to her areas of research.
Prospective students and collaborators
Future research is likely to be more oriented towards considerations of non-Enlightenment philosophy as an aspect of new social theory, the role of embodied or relational knowledge in technology governance, and to participatory, experiential, walking or land-based methods. If you are working on a project that is in dialogue with crip or queer theory, indigenous knowledges or place-based knowledge, or focused on epistemic justice, please get in touch.