Faranak Hardcastle

Faranak is a Research Fellow in the CELS-Oxford research group at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University Bristol.

Faranak is a sociotechnical researcher exploring how technologies and societies shape each other and evolve together, and how we can intervene in this evolution to direct it towards a point where their benefits are equally distributed. She uses insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Critical Data and Algorithm Studies to critically engage with the development and application of new healthcare and web technologies. She is particularly interested in researching the sociotechnical relations that shape Big Data and AI technologies, their application to Personalised Medicine, and their implications for knowledge making, ethics, and the lived experiences of different social groups.

Faranak collaborates with experts from various disciplines and employs a range of qualitative and computational approaches. Her research interests also include participatory methodologies and co-design approaches and she is involved in a project that explores the application of story completion methods to engage with the views of potential participants in Southampton about the use of routinely collected healthcare data.

Prior to joining CELS Faranak contributed to the S3W project, an interdisciplinary investigation of the opportunities and challenges of Semantic Linked Data for researching health inequalities that used the data from English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the Great British Class Survey. Her PhD research experimented with the application of speculative design for exploring the sociotechnical processes involved in Online Behavioural Tracking and Advertising technologies and practices.