About Me

Emily Robinson

I am an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of technology, society, ethics, and sustainability. My research explores how emerging technologies are interpreted, contested, and governed, and how values and competing understandings of the future shape the technologies we develop and adopt.

I am particularly interested in technologies that sit at the centre of societal change — from artificial intelligence to decarbonisation technologies. These technologies are often presented as technical solutions to complex problems, but their development and adoption are never purely technical. They raise questions about whose knowledge matters, whose values are represented, who bears responsibility, and which futures are considered possible or desirable.

Research
Philosophy

My work starts from a simple premise: technologies do not exist independently of the societies that create and use them.

Technologies embody assumptions about what matters, what constitutes a problem, what counts as evidence, and what kinds of futures are worth pursuing. These assumptions can become particularly visible when technologies are contested.

I therefore study not only what technologies do, but how people make sense of them. I am interested in the meanings attached to technologies, the conflicts that emerge around those meanings, and the processes through which some interpretations become more influential than others.

This perspective connects my work across AI, sustainability, technological transitions, and responsible innovation.

My Approach

My research combines computational social science, qualitative methods, and science and technology studies (STS).

Computational methods allow me to investigate patterns and dynamics across large-scale social and textual datasets. Qualitative research provides the depth needed to understand people's experiences, interpretations, and reasoning. STS provides a way of examining technologies within the wider social, political, and institutional contexts in which they are produced and used.

I am particularly interested in bringing these approaches into conversation rather than treating them as competing ways of producing knowledge.

For me, interdisciplinarity is not simply about using methods from different disciplines. It is about recognising that different approaches can reveal different aspects of a problem — and that complex sociotechnical questions are often lost when they are reduced to a single perspective.

© 2026 Emily Robinson