Professor Carolyn Pedwell

Professor in Digital Media

Research Overview

Carolyn Pedwell is Professor in Digital Media. She is a cultural and media theorist with an international reputation for her work on affect and artificial intelligence; digital media and culture; habits and social change; the politics of empathy; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.

Carolyn is the author of three monographs: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021); Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014); and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). She is also the co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023). Carolyn’s monograph in progress is Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of Computational Cultures.

Prior to arriving at Lancaster, Carolyn was Professor of Cultural Studies and Media at the University of Kent; Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University; and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Carolyn has been Visiting Scholar at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics (LSE). Carolyn completed her PhD in Gender Studies at the LSE.

Carolyn’s current research is focused on socio-political, cultural, and affective histories and futures of AI and digital computing. Her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2024-2025), ‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI and the Making of Computational Cultures’, is developing an affective post-war genealogy of human-machine relations in Britain and North America oriented around shifting conceptualisations of intuition, with reference to ‘artificial intuition’. Her Leverhulme Fellowship, ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’ (2020-2021), explored how digital and computational media are transforming ‘the human’. Her research has also been funded by the AHRC, ESRC and SSHRC.

Carolyn is a member of the Independent Social Research Foundation's international 'Social and Cultural Frameworks for Artificial Intelligence' research group. She was an Editor of the international journal Feminist Theory (Sage) between 2010-2020 and currently sits on the advisory board of the journal. She is also on the advisory board of Imbricate Press and an editorial borad member of Media Theory and Capacious journals.

Current Teaching

Carolyn is part of the team teaching Media and Cultural Studies.

Carolyn was External Examiner for the MA in Psychosocial Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London (2017-2021). She was also External Examiner for the MA degrees in Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK (2014-2018).

Research Grants

Carolyn's British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, ‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI and the Making of Computational Cultures’ (2024-2025), situates the rise of ‘artificial intuition’ within histories and atmospheres of techno-social encounter in Britain and North America from the 1930s to today – spanning the advent of digital computing and the consolidation of machine learning architectures.

Her Leverhulme Fellowship, ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’ (2020-2021), explored how digital and computational media are transforming ‘the human’. Arguing that it matters what kind of human our engagements with technology produce, this project established a framework to explore the transformative dynamics of digital media informed by feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.

Carolyn's recent research project, 'Habit, Power and Social Transformation’ (2014-2020), funded by a University of Kent small grant, explored what habits tell us about social change, power and ‘progressive’ politics at the intersection of neoliberalism, digital culture and transnational politics. Her monograph, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021) argues that seemingly minor everyday habits that are vital to meaningful change.

Her previous AHRC Fellowship, ‘Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy’ (2013-2014), examined the links between transnational politics and the ‘turn to affect’. Her monograph, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014), explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to 'be empathetic', and their social and geopolitical implications.

Carolyn's ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, ‘Gender, Embodiment and Cultural Practice: Exploring Issues in Theory, Media and Policy’ (2008-2009), was held at the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths and examined the links between gender, cross-cultural comparison and ‘the body’. This project produced the monograph, Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010).

In addition, Carolyn has conducted research consultancy work on gender relations in digital media; the informal economy, political participation and representation, international development, and social enterprise for organisations including The International Labour Organisation (ILO), The UK Department for International Development (DFID), One World Action, FrankPR and Social Enterprise London.