My research explores how people create and sustain intimacy — with one another, and with intelligent technologies — and how generative AI is reshaping ideas of the self and what it means to be human.

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Current book project: Intelligent Artifice

An examination of emerging forms of human–AI intimacy: romantic relationships with AI companions, AI in therapeutic settings, and technologies that let people maintain connections with the dead. I explore these systems not as tools but as participants in social life — reconfiguring personhood, care, memory, and connection.

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AI, welfare, and the state

I've also researched the use of machine learning in UK local government, examining how algorithmic systems are used in children's welfare decisions, and how cultural assumptions about family and kinship become embedded in technical systems.

 

Cuba: property, value, and the informal economy

Alongside my AI work, I've spent over a decade conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba on the informal economy, digital media, kinship, and morality. My second monograph, Speculative Futures, traces the transformation of Cuba's property market from the Revolution to the present, and how shifting economic conditions entangle with changing moral understandings of value and ownership.

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I completed my PhD at UCL in 2020, and have since held academic positions at the University of Manchester, KU Leuven, UCL, and the Alan Turing Institute.