It’s important to show occasional signs of life on a personal blog. It’s been nearly two years since my last post, and a lot has happened since then, so here is an update on recent activities.
In April 2024, I left my position at Victoria University of Wellington to join the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tokyo. I was fortunate enough to receive the “Excellent Young Researcher” award, which provides generous support for my work for my first five years. Related links are on the About Me page.
The move from New Zealand to Japan ate up a considerable chunk of my time last year, but I’ve been continuing at a slow but steady pace on research of digital platforms in the university (with Lorena Gibson, which we’ve presented at recent ASAANZ and 4S conferences), human-machine interface engineering, the history of cybernetics, and a few other things. Last year was a wash for publications and presentations, but 2026 will be a recovery.
My colleagues and I in the editorial collective of the Engaging Science, Technology, and Society journal were awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science Infrastructure award at the 2024 meeting in Amsterdam.
I was elected to 4S Council for a three-year term, where I’ll work with the incoming president Wen-Hua Kuo and a group of excellent colleagues to serve the STS community. I was also invited to be a member of the Editorial Board of Science, Technology and Human Values.
On the blog side, visitors seem to be coming to read my posts on how to formulate questions for a research proposal, and how to think about literature reviews. These are being translated for publication in Japanese early next year, and I have a third post in draft on writing about methods which I hope will be done some day.