Dr Faranak Hardcastle

Faranak is a Research Fellow in the UNESCO Chair in Science Communication for the Public Good research group at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the ANU, a visiting fellow at the Clinical Ethics, Law, and Society (CELS) at the University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the department of Medicine at the University of Southampton.

Faranak is a sociotechnical researcher examining the mutual shaping and co-evolution of technologies and societies, with a focus on how to intervene in this process to ensure that the benefits are equitably distributed. Drawing on insights from Sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), she critically engages with the development and application of emerging technologies in AI, Semantic Linked Data, and Personalized Medicine.

Faranak collaborates with experts from various disciplines and employs a range of qualitative and computational approaches. Her work also explores the opportunities and challenges presented by a broad range of methods. She is particularly interested in the potential of co-production methods to articulate alternative futures that are both more equitable and sustainable, while also retrospectively analyzing and reconceptualizing the present to identify effective interventions that can drive positive change.

Prior to joining CPAS Faranak was a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Center for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford where she contributed to research on the ethical and environmental issues related to genomics. She also was a Research Associate based at the University of Bristol, where she was involved in the S3W project, an interdisciplinary investigation of the opportunities and challenges of Semantic Linked Data for researching health inequalities that used data from English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the Great British Class Survey. Faranak’s PhD research experimented with the application of speculative design for exploring the sociotechnical processes involved in Online Behavioural Tracking and Advertising technologies and practices.