Research, practice, and grassroots action on identity, information infrastructure, and the lives shaped by them.
Institutions understand people through data. Names, identifiers, categories, records, and measurements. These representations make public services and administration possible. But they also simplify human lives, and those simplications have consequences.
My work looks at how people become represented in information systems, how those representations get authority, and what happens when the person and the digital record no longer match.
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Every information system is an abstraction. To make people administratively legible, institutions translate human lives into fields, categories, identifiers, and draw relationships between the records.
Those choices are never just descriptive. Once they get built into the infrastructure, they shape what institutions can know, which differences they can recognise, and how they respond when someone's life doesn't follow the assumptions that were encoded into the system.
A category can determine who is eligible for a public service. An identifier can connect records across institutions. A classification might become difficult for someone to change once it gets propogated across the databases. A standard that was supposed to describe a population could become something that people are expected to fit, rather than the other way around.
Across my research, consultancy, and my grassroots work, I study these points where human lives are translated into data, and where assumptions about the data are translated into assumptions about the person. I'm not just interested in who gets excluded, but also how information infrastructures produce the conditions for recognition, participation, and exclusion in the first place.
My research examines identity data, categorisation, and information infrastructures, particularly around what happens when personal information changes, the conflicts this creates across systems, or the ways it can fail to reflect the person it represents.
My doctoral research investigated how identity categories are negotiated and changed in public-sector information systems, and how some technical decisions about data structures and dropdown menus can produce material consequences for the people recorded in the systems.
This article explores how digital identity systems fail when personal data changes, highlighting legal rulings, infrastructural intertia, biometric limitations, and the resulting social exclusion and...
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Whether it's a chat about a research topic, a review of a system that handles sensitive data, or something at the grassroots, I'd like to hear about it. Fill in the form below and I'll get back to you soon.