Dr Ash Watson is a Scientia Fellow and Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney. She is a sociologist of technology, culture and storytelling.

Her work explores artificial intelligence and emerging technologies; the sociotechnical dimensions of belonging, health and wellbeing; how people experience digital change; and alternative and DIY creative cultural practices. She is currently a new study in partnership with public libraries studying the loop between digital and social inequality.

Her research unites qualitative, creative and digital methods. She is interested in innovative approaches that grapple with storytelling, collective feelings, imaginaries, moods and atmospheres. Conceptually her work engages with affect theory, queer theory and practice, and sociomaterial approaches to expectation, knowledge/sense, narratives and futures.

In 2025 she was an affiliate/visiting fellow at the University of Glasgow. In 2024 she was a visiting research fellow at the ESRC Centre for SocioDigital Futures at the University of Bristol. In 2017 she was an Endeavour Research Fellow based at Goldsmiths, University of London, as part of her doctoral program. 

Ash is Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review. She is an invited Editorial Board Member of the leading methodological journal Qualitative Research and of DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, the first academic journal dedicated to this theme. 

Her debut novel Into the Sea was published by Brill in 2020. She runs the independent zine publisher Frances St Press and is the creator/editor of So Fi Zine, an open-access publication for experiments in social inquiry.