Amanda Windle

Amanda Windle is Chair of a homeless therapeutic community called the Simon Community London. Her UK advocacy for homeless matters is anchored in theories of affect and feminisms (feminist STS and technoscience). As member of the design group for the online Disaster-STS Research Network, Windle contributes to transnational and decolonial discourse focused on Covid-19. Windle initially researched online chatbot development pre-Siri and post-Eliza, researching how the autonomous technology was posited as therapeutic work through to sex work. Her methods were autoethnographic and practice-based, creating interactive ‘rudiments'. These are a fragmentary and pre-experimental methods for doing online research with AI. Her research moved to co-leading GIS web application design and development on projects to do with climate change, and environmental threats to endangered species, alongside the environmental lab at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Her research led to working on projects in the north of England, including working with older, harder-to-reach audiences in multi-arts venues on the design and development of digital ticketing apps. This research catalysed Windle to become an elected spokesperson and co-author of a digital funding report for the Voices of Culture, a parallel dialogue with the EU Commission for the creative arts.

Windle has been recognised as an AHRC Next Generation Thinker for design (2017). Throughout the twenty tens she also designed and led bespoke data visualisation short courses for various government departments in the UK. As a guest columnist for the New Statesman Tech, Windle wrote on the EU Referendum, and social media trolling. Further tech research led to a TechNorth project between 2017-19, supporting 35 leading women-in-tech with their social media and public press appearances and short form media writing. As an advocate for short-form writing, Windle is the editor for Backchannels, and since 2019 a member of the 4S Council. Windle taught graphic design and new media for a decade at the University of the Creative Arts London, and a further nine years directing the DigiLab. Spanning all of the projects is an attachment to an ethics of care, be this teaching media ethics, mentoring over fifty early-career researchers, or serving on the University Ethics Committee and the doctoral Supervisors' Forum while employed as the Head of the LCC Graduate School,  University of the Arts London. Her combined research and teaching has seen her guest lecture at Hong Kong Space, IUAV in Venice, and Linnaeus University in Kalmar. Windle wrote the book, A Companion of Feminisms for Digital Design and Spherology (2019).