Sarah Pink is a Professor working across the Design Research Institute and the School of Media and Communications at RMIT. She is visiting Aarhus University in June this year, and Cultural Transformations are honored to host a workshop with her about applied research. During the workshop she will tell about her projects and experiences, and afterwards, we will discuss how we, with our different approaches, apply research in other context.

Sarah Pink’s research combines theoretical and methodological scholarship with applied practice. She works across themes including digital media, energy, consumption, everyday life, sustainability, activism, tacit and sensory ways of knowing, safety and health and the construction industry. She researches across urban, domestic and workplace environments. Her work is often developed through interdisciplinary collaborations across design, engineering and arts disciplines to which she brings social and cultural research expertise. She simultaneously pursues her own theoretical and methodological agenda focusing on media, technologies, embodied ways of knowing and situated processes of change and intervention.

Sarah is a global authority on digital visual and sensory ethnography methodologies. To view one of her recent keynote lectures in this area click here inVisio Inspire Keynote. Sarah is co-located in the Design Research Institute and connects with the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in the School of Media and Communication. She joined RMIT in 2012 from Loughborough University (UK), where she now holds a part time Professorship of Social Sciences and continues her work as co-investigator leading the ethnographic strands of two interdisciplinary projects: 1) ‘Lower effort energy demand reduction’ (EPSRC funded £1.7m). See http://www.leedr-project.co.uk for details of the project and investigators. 2) ‘Management of OSH in Networked Systems of Production or Service Delivery: Comparisons between Healthcare, Construction and Logistics’, (IOSH funded £299,633) (led by Prof Alistair Gibb).

Since 2005 Sarah has also researched and published on urban activism, media, the global-local, sustainability and wellbeing through her work on the Cittaslow (Slow City) movement in the UK (Nuffield Foundation funded 2005-7), and in 2011, in Spain (with Prof Lisa Servon, The New School, New York). She is now expanding the global reach of this work to research the development of the Australasian Cittaslow network (with Assoc. Professor Tania Lewis at RMIT)

Pink, S. (2007) Doing Visual Ethnography: images, media and representation in research. London: Sage

Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography, London: Sage

Pink, S. (2012) Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places, London: Sage.