I worked as a contractor with social change agency Purpose on their project with the Foundation for International Law for the Environment translating their report on the hidden effects of climate litigation for fundraisers, campaigners, and other stakeholders.
I interviewed and wrote-up eight features on a series of EIT-funded startups, working across sustainability, inclusivity, artificial intelligence, design / architecture, and wellbeing. You can find the articles linked here.
www.digital-activist.org is an initiative by The Movement Hub to support grassroots groups and movements in amplifying their impact with a diversity of digital campaigning tools. Built by campaigner Akshey Kalra, I supported on copywriting, UX writing, and CMS / platform management.
On tracks like ‘Alaura’ and ‘Slave Priest’, Genesis P-Orridge’s voice is the sole source of sounds used, alchemically manipulated into shifting whispers slowly folding over themselves.
MARRKNULL mulls over the worlds of the past, present, and future, and takes a third-person perspective on the relationship between humanity and nature, expressing revolt against traditional anthropocentrism through his garments.
Client was Paris-based fashion agency Autrement PR.
YouTube and Facebook are allowing disinformation to be spread about Brazil’s election campaign, adding to the bitterness in an already polarized and violent election, according to a new report by the human rights organization Global Witness.
The NGO produced a series of purposely misleading ads during an election season that has been dominated by the bitter race between far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and his leftist challenger, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
I worked as a researcher and communications consultant with Global Witness on their investigations into misinformation during the 2020 Brazilian election and the 2020 midterms in the US.
"To some, this may sound like handing the creative work of design over to an algorithm. But GD can mean that software and user work more harmoniously in tandem, multiplying the strengths that each brings to the table.
An in-the-box array of design solutions might be just the creative aid needed to scope new ideas and reimagine old ones."
An as-yet unpublished blog introducing Generative Design to a non-specialised audience. PDF enclosed below (view)
Signing a petition or sending a letter to a decision maker can feel like such a small thing. Does it really work?
Why voices are powerful
Not only do campaigns and petitions demonstrate public support for an issue, they put pressure on our elected officials to act. Thousands of voices demanding change are hard to ignore.
Even a tiny action can have a powerful effect. You just sharing a blog post or video on social media can make the difference between helping a cause snowball and gain the support it needs, or fading into obscurity.
Petitions + local activism + policy research –> world leaders taking action
But we don’t just rely on online campaigns. ONE brings together several lines of attack.
We also work with local activists and community groups to help them raise awareness of the issue and take action where they live.
At the same time, we present expert policy research to the people making decisions. We show politicians hard evidence of the positive impact of the policy we’re proposing, backed up by huge amounts of public support (that’s where your voice comes in).
Your voice helps us make a compelling rational and emotional case for passing legislation that will help defeat extreme poverty. And that’s when the people in power take action.
Your voices helped secure billions of dollars of investment for Africa
An example: ONE successfully campaigned for the BUILD act, a bill to help boost private investment in developing African countries that could improve millions of lives.
Nearly 80,000 ONE supporters like you signed petitions in support of the act and thousands more wrote to decision-makers, while our team worked with Republicans and Democrats across the political divide.
We hand-delivered the huge petition to government offices in all 50 states. And we brought ONE student leaders to Washington, D.C., where they held 54 lobby meetings to discuss the importance of the bill with their members of Congress.
The effect of all these voices? Government passed the bill. The BUILD act now allows billions of private sector dollars to flow into Africa by making it easier for American entrepreneurs to do business there. This is going to help build vital infrastructure, give more people access to electricity for the first time, and create jobs – all part of eradicating extreme poverty.
So, will my voice make a difference?
As you can see from the example above –- yes it will! Together we can use the power of the people to influence the people in power. This is how we’ll build a better world by 2030.
I was brought on as copywriting consultant for ONE.org's Global Week of Action project in January and February of 2022, writing copy for the microsite as well as a series of blogs and internal communications docs.
Across diverse disciplines there is increasing recognition of the important role that structural factors play in a variety of outcomes, as well the power of structural explanations to elucidate the causes of persistent inequality. However, capturing the complex network data required by these analyses remains high-burden – both for researchers and research participants.
Whereas tools for capturing and analyzing digital trace data have proliferated, there has been a clear lack of equivalent growth in methodologies such as interviewing and surveying. Even where high quality digital survey tools do exist, they are often optimized for capturing individual rather than network data.
The Network Canvas project aims to address these and other problems, by providing a set of high quality digital tools that facilitate the capture of complex network data. It provides intuitive participant facing interfaces, and powerful researcher facing tools with shallow learning curves, to enable data capture that was previously intractable.
Please see the following promotional video to learn more about our team, our objectives, and the features of the Network Canvas suite of tools.
An overview summarising the performance of the 'Stories' feature I introduced while at European Changemakers, as well as an overall evaluation of social media metrics over the course of the Greenpeace-affiliated project.
I worked as a communications and content consultant with Greenpeace Nordic's 'Movement Hub' project (formerly European Changemakers) over 2020 and into 2021, whose goal was to boost grassroots movement-building across Europe.
While in the role I created a blog series, produced videos, facilitated trainings, and helped burgeoning movements use social media and digital technology to tell their stories and grow their campaigns.
I wrote and produced this video for Greenpeace Nordic's 'European Changemakers' project, bringing together activists from Italy, India, Slovakia, the UK, and beyond. The clip was viewed over 2,000 times in its first month.
It began with a seemingly simple proposition: what can we learn about different relationships to climate through the food practices of migrants in the kitchen, a site that has traditionally belonged to domestic, feminised labour? To be feminised is to be precarious, but what could it mean to work through precarity as a radical generative condition; one of vulnerability, of unpredictability and transformation, or ceding control to unknown variables, of being transformed as we transform others (Tsing, 2015).
Shifting our view of precarity in this manner changes social analysis, for a precarious world is a world without teleology (Tsing, 2015), which is a world without genesis, which (as the saying goes) is perhaps a world without end (Haraway, 1985). This is a world without Eden, where we do not need to be innocent or uncontaminated to thrive, but may in fact thrive due to contamination. Thinking through precarity shows us that indeterminacy can enable life (Tsing, 2015), and it creates opportunities for us to recover the blasted landscapes that are the legacies of globalisation, colonisation and industrial capital as sites of flourishing.
Kitchen Cultures was founded as part of a collaboration between artist, designer and researcher Kaajal Modi, and occupational therapist turned no-waste chef Fatima Tarkleman, conceived initially as a food-art-science-sustainability residency in The Eden Project’s
Invisible Worlds exhibition. The project has since, through the vagaries of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the various stages of lockdown, evolved into a community storytelling and recipe sharing project that has predominantly been run remotely using Zoom, Whatsapp, Instagram, and via telephone.
I contributed a chapter to this collection on meme culture out on Punctum Books, alongside McKenzie Wark and and Ian Parker.
"The counter-voice in our digital era to advertising’s visual hegenomy is meme culture; a form with no intrinsic meaning, full
of sound and fury, signifying fuck all. The evasive art form establishes a representational scheme inverse to advertising and,
through a sort of dream-like resampling, dilutes its potency.
Unlike emojis, imagined by artist Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese mobile giant NTT DoCoMo, memes were never created but
instead emerged from the runoff of early Internet culture, primarily on boards such as 4chan. They were a way to facilitate
online community-building, and became over time a more universal vocabulary through which to speak across its atomised
structure."
I contributed a chapter to this collection on the regeneration of London, out on Repeater Books and Penguin Random House, featuring Owen Hatherley and Anna Minton.
"Aria once said that time was a code that repeated, and that this was evident in what humanity knew of
science and history. There must be a prime mover, he thought, who took great comfort in its
repetition, like the repetition of a Vedic spiritual."