I am an ethnographer of ethics, measurement and evaluation, where the life and computer sciences meet. I research sites of deliberation and uncertainty, attending to the negotiation of decisions about what is right, necessary, desirable, possible – and what is not. Much of my work has involved thinking through contemporary meanings of “ethics” with committees and scientists of different stripes.

The focus of my PhD was the review and ‘recognition’ of ethics committees in the Asian region in the work of a capacity building NGO funded by the World Health Organisation. During that project, I became interested in ideas and processes of quality management, and the social morality of forms, figures and documents. Building on this work with colleagues in Denmark and the USA, in 2015 I co-convened a workshop to critically analyse the ethnographic implications of “capacity building” through a Wenner Gren funded workshop in Copenhagen, the website for which is here and the ensuing special issue here.

Ethics procedures and committees remain central sites of interest to me, and I continue to study them part of broader research infrastructures. From 2017-2020 I am taking part in a Horizon 2020 project looking at ethics in practice during IoT development, and I head the subproject Bodies of Data on a Velux Foundation project called Data as Relation (2017-2019).