I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the Centre for Research in Digital Education. My research interests include the mobilities of digital education in development contexts and the implications of such thinking for educational mobility overall. My published work includes critical perspectives on educational technologies (AI, MOOCs, mobile technology); the mobilities of digital education students; and futures educational research.

At the University of Edinburgh, I am PI on the GCRF-funded Digital Education Africa cluster, Co-I on the Mastercard Foundation-funded Foundations for All project, and co-I on the Universal Secondary Education in Asia Pacific project. I am a core team member of the Future University Lab at UNA Europa. I have worked on the Near Futures Teaching project, the Distance Learning at Scale project, and was formerly part of the NERC Research for Emergency Aftershock Response project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea for many years. I am also a Director and Co-Founder of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT4D. I work often with INGOs on digital education projects. 

My research focuses on the critical examination of the mobilities exhibited by groups and sectors in flux and how technology is used to both structure and manage these mobilities. Post-Brexit, with greater concentrations of international students, displaced peoples, and refugees, with the unbundling of labour and education, with a global edtech regime emerging in developing contexts largely unmooring local educational expertise and displacing higher education as a vehicle for social mobility, this research focuses on frameworks to investigate these movements holistically and to begin to address the larger intractable challenges that may stunt educational progress in development contexts. I routinely employ mobilities research and sociomateriality to identify “the distribution of agency between people, places, and material assemblages of connectivity” (Sheller, 2017) and the role digital education might serve in an increasingly unbundled intersectional environment.

I have years of experience working with digital education in development contexts throughout Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, including sitting on the Advisory Board of one such university in Nigeria; years of experience working with faculty and students in universities as both instructor and supervisor, including on the MSc in Digital Education; and capacity for cross-sector knowledge exchange from consulting experience with relevant industries such as DfID, USAID, GIZ, World Bank, UN Habitat, and more. I am a Fellow in the Higher Education Academy (HEA), in keeping with the requirements of the UK Professional Standards Framework.