We are delighted to announce that Kat Braybrooke will be joining us as a visiting researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.
During her stay, she will build on the findings of her doctoral research on the power relations of “makerspaces” in cultural institutions by exploring local community projects that harness digital creativity to foster social and environmental justice. More about her research interests can be found in her bio (below) and she can be found on Twitter at @codekat. Welcome Kat!
Kat Braybrooke is a digital anthropologist and director of Studiõ Wê & Üs with extensive international experience in leading design and curatorial projects in collaboration with open technology, media arts and third sector organisations across Europe, Canada and Asia. Her work critically examines the links between material participation and socio-cultural transitions, taking a particular look at the dynamics of creative digital communities and spaces, and their associations with institutional actors, from libraries to governments. Kat was awarded a PhD in Media & Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex in 2019 for a study funded by the Sussex Humanities Lab which combined ethnographic and action research to explore the institutional dynamics of a new generation of experimental sites for digital making and learning around cultural artefacts, or ‘collections makerspaces’, within four museums in London, from Tate to the British Museum. She also studied the associations between maker cultures and government sustainability policies in China as a delegate of the British Council in 2018 and 2019, and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Humboldt Centre for Transformations of Human-Environment Systems in Berlin. In association with her academic projects, Kat has spent the past decade working with third sector collaborators like Mozilla, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the UK Parliament, and the Liu Centre for Global Issues to decolonise networked technologies and foster greater digital agency for marginalised and non-binary communities through critical making and design interventions. Her work has been featured on the BBC, Guardian, DAZED, Rabble, Furtherfield and The Tyee, and she is an editor of the Journal of Peer Production.