home

hi, I’m Ash Watson, an academic & writer based in Sydney, Australia.

My research explores sociological imagination, or how people understand the relationship between themselves and the society they live within. I am interested in how people sense, feel, imagine and experience this relation. I apply this lens to understand the unequal social impacts of technologies like AI, the importance of civic cultural spaces like archives and libraries, and modes of telling stories.

My work aims to make palpable feelings and senses that are often absent or abstracted in academic work: desire, hope, longing, memories, promise, secrecy, trust, need, what it’s like to be watched, what it’s like to be seen. These offer important insights for imagining the futures we need and want, as they illuminate the ‘felt value’ of things and why we as a society follow certain socio-technical paths.

I am a Scientia Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) with the Centre for Social Research in Health. I’m also an Affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). I have held a number of visiting positions: in 2025 with The University of Glasgow, in 2023 with the ESRC Centre for SocioDigital Futures at the University of Bristol, and in 2017 at Goldsmiths, University of London as a Doctoral Endeavour Research Fellow. I currently supervise doctoral candidates across sociology, STS, cultural studies and media/communications.

I am Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review‘s quarterly and the creator/editor of So Fi Zine — a twice-yearly publication for sociological fiction, poetry and visual art. I run the indie zine publisher and distro Frances Street Press. My debut novel Into the Sea was published by Brill in 2020. My PhD, awarded in 2018, examined the value of fiction for sociological imagination and public sociology.

My grants and publications are listed here.

Contact me via email at ashleigh.watson@unsw.edu.au. Subscribe for sociological fiction news via awtsn.substack.com.

Google Scholar | University webpage | LinkedIn | Bluesky