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Research

RESEARCH AFFILIATIONS 

2021 – now
Member, Platform Economies Research Network, The New School, USA

2020
Visiting Scholar, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark [postponed due to Coronavirus]

2019 – now
Scientific Advisory Board, Department of STS (formerly MCTS), Technical University Munich, Germany

2019 – now
Member, Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation, Lancaster University, UK

2017
Visiting Scholar, Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

2017
Visiting Professor, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University of Munich

2016 – now
Associate, Innovation Policy Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, Toronto University, Canada

2016 – now
Advisory Board, Changing Political Economy of Research and Innovation annual workshop

2014 –
Member, Adapting Canadian Workplaces (ACW), York University, Canada

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Current & Future Research Agenda

  • Technoscientific Capitalism: broadly-speaking, my current and future research is concerned with understanding the entanglement of finance and technoscience.
  • Data Assets & Data Rentiership: I’m increasingly interested in questions about the measurement and valuation of personal data. I explore these issues through the concepts of assetization and rentiership. Rentiership involves the extraction of value from social activities and relations, rather than the creation of assets: https://rentiership.com/
  • Financing in High-tech Sectors (e.g. life sciences, digital tech): I’m interested in economic expertise, assumptions, and knowledges as well technoscience itself. I study the financing of technoscience in order to understand how financial logics (e.g. capitalization), financial knowledges (e.g. accounting), and financial practices (e.g. corporate governance) come to configure the organization and governance of high-tech sectors. 
  • Emerging Bio-economies: I’ve got a long-standing interest in the emerging bio-economy, which can be defined as a societal pathway to a low-carbon future underpinned by the use of biological energy, materials, chemicals, and processes (cf. fossil fuels). I want to extend my research on biofuels to other areas of the bio-economy across North America, in order to explore the configuration of bio-economy value chains. As such, I am interested in how biological materials (e.g. wood, sugar, etc.) are framed and reframed as natural resources through particular technoscientific knowledges and practices; how they are incorporated into global value chains; and the implications of these processes to a range of social actors from different parts of the world.

Past Research

  • Biofuels, Biotechnology & Renewable Energy: funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and focused on innovation in renewable energy generation from ‘advanced’ or ‘second generation’ biofuels. I was interested in how new forms of environmental technoscience (e.g. advanced biofuels) are configured by neoliberalism and, in turn, how they come to configure neoliberalism.
  • Sustainable Infrastructure & the Engineering Profession: funded by Work in Warming World program, I looked at innovation in transport infrastructure  that respond to needs for climate change adaptation and mitigation. I was interested in the implications of this sort of innovation for the engineering profession (e.g. codes, training, education, licensing, etc.).
  • Public-private Partnerships & the New Market-State: I examined the marketization of public services and public infrastructure developments.
  • Rethinking Neoliberalism: I critically unpacked the concept of neoliberal. This arose from a dissatisfaction with current analytical accounts of neoliberalism that characterize it as a market-centred ideology, project or epistemic order.
  • Innovation and Knowledge-based Commodity Chains in the Life Sciences: longstanding interest in the innovation and spatial dynamics of the life sciences. I received funding from the ESRC to study the particular forms of innovation and economic governance along ‘knowledge-based commodity chains’ and how this relates to regional development and upgrading.
  • Varieties of Neoliberalism: I looked at neoliberal restructuring in terms of the variety and diversity of supra-national, national and regional strategies; this was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

WORKING PAPERS