For contact and collaboration: info [at] autonomy.work
Core Team
Will Stronge
Will is Autonomy’s Director of Research. He holds a PhD in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Brighton and with Helen Hester is currently writing Post-work (Bloomsbury 2022).
will [at] autonomy.work
Kyle Lewis
Kyle co-founded Autonomy and leads on shorter working week consultancy and research. With Will Stronge, he is the co-author of Overtime (Verso, 2021)
kyle [at] autonomy.work
India Burgess
India has spent several years working in public sector consultancy and climate campaigning. She is Autonomy’s Head of Advocacy, connecting our research with social movements and organisations across the UK.
india [at] autonomy.work
Julian Siravo
Julian heads Autonomy_Urban, with a focus on ageing populations and the future of care, logistics and workspace. An Architect and Urbanist from Rome, he has spent time both in commercial and research-based architectural practices. In his work Julian has explored automated construction, ideas of post-familial domesticity and socialized care-work.
julian [at] autonomy.work
Phil Jones
Phil is a Senior Researcher, and a member of the Autonomy Digital hub. His expertise lies in precarious work, clickwork, crowdwork and the surrounding policy options. He is the author of Work Without the Worker (Verso, 2021).
phil [at] autonomy.work
Joe Ryle
Joe is Autonomy’s Media and Comms Lead, delivering press coverage across the media for our work. He’s also a campaigner for the four day week, a former advisor to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP and a former Labour Party Press officer.
joe [at] autonomy.work
Jack Kellam
Jack is Autonomy’s Lead Editor, and oversees content produced for the Autonomy blog and the Feminist Futures Programme, drawing on experience within the think-tank sector and academia. He also acts as our social media manager.
jack [at] autonomy.work
Tatiana Pignon
Tatiana is an experienced consultant and researcher with eight years of experience spanning public and private sectors. She is part of our workplace consultancy team.
tatiana [at] autonomy.work
Lukas Kikuchi
Lukas is a specialist in stochastic processes, large deviations theory and statistical physics. He forms part of the Autonomy Data Unit (ADU), which produces cutting-edge data analysis and visualisation on the present and future of work.
lukas [at] autonomy.work
Cosimo Campani
Cosimo is an Italian architect and a Researcher for Autonomy_Urban. He pursued a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism at Roma Tre University and the Architectural Association, where his research ranged from manufacturing and domestic work, to automation and logistics. He has lectured as a visiting professor at Yale Architecture Advanced Design Studio and taught at RomaTre University, the Royal College of Art and the Architectural Association.
Luiz Garcia
Luiz is a quantitative economist versed in heterodox and mainstream theories. With the Autonomy Data Unit (ADU), he assesses work relations through micro and macroeconomic modelling in multiregional and multisectoral scenarios.
luiz [at] autonomy.work
Sonia Balagopalan
Sonia holds a PhD in mathematics from Maynooth University. Her research specialises in geometry and discrete optimization, which informs her work with the ADU on database manipulation and data visualisation.
sonia [at] autonomy.work
Advisory Board
Maria Dada
Maria is a Lecturer at London College of Communication UAL and Visiting Lecturer in the Media, Culture and Language department at Roehampton University. Her research is placed within the fields of design and material culture.
maria [at] autonomy.work
Helen Hester
Helen is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and post-work politics, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, 2022, with Nick Srnicek)
Nick Srnicek
Nick is Lecturer in Digital Economy in the Digital Humanities department at King’s College London. His current research is focused on post-work politics and social reproduction, and how the two separate areas can be fit together. He is the co-author, with Dr. Helen Hester, of a forthcoming book, entitled After Work (Verso, 2022) and has previously written on labour market transformations – Inventing the Future (co-authored with Dr. Alex Williams, Verso, 2015) – and on the digital economy and its dynamics: Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016).
Kathi Weeks
Kathi Weeks teaches in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program at Duke University. Her primary interests are in political theory, feminist theory, Marxist thought, the critical study of work, and utopian studies. She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects (re-issued by Verso in 2018) and The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke UP, 2011), and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader (Blackwell, 2000).
Alice Martin
Alice is a Labour Specialist at PIRC and an Associate Fellow at the New Economics Foundation
Partnership Researchers
We are collaborating with AHRC Doctoral Training Programmes to deliver placements for emergent researchers in the field.
Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry is an AHRC-funded researcher at Kingston University, writing a PhD about the relationship between art and politics, focusing on experimental approaches to curatorial and institutional organisation. He previously worked as a curator and/or director in visual arts festivals, galleries and museums. Patrick will be working with Autonomy_Urban on the ‘Welfare state for the 21st century’ research strand, looking at creative and cultural infrastructures.
Jess Thorne
Jess Thorne is a PhD candidate in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her PhD work explores the labour movement in Spain during the years of the Franco dictatorship and focuses on the contexts of prison and exile. As part of her placement with Autonomy, she will be exploring the rich history of worker-led innovation, including the development of technologies that could help tackle climate change.
Andrius Vaitkus
Andrius is a Particle Physics PhD candidate who is currently on a placement with Autonomy. His work at the Large Hadron Collider involved using machine learning techniques to optimise large scale calculations of particle collisions in the detector. His placement project at Autonomy aims to study the public opinions of climate change policies by web scraping the discussion on various social media.
Eleanor McIndoe
Eleanor is studying a master’s in physics at University College London. Her research interests include machine learning, renewable energy materials and solid-state physics. With Autonomy, she will be working on a research project regarding high temperatures and work in the UK – aiming to forecast danger areas and worker categories that might be at risk in the years to come.
Research Affiliates
We have a wide network of researchers working in related fields and with which we learn and collaborate with.
Stephanie Sherman
Stephanie is a producer, researcher, and strategist working at the intersection of social and speculative design. Her projects activate latent surplus and stories to reorganize outmoded systems into platforms for co-production.
Hina Pandya
Hina specialises in business strategy and has a track record of initiating large projects with corporates such as Google, as well as nascent start-ups that run innovative organisational structures.
Danielle Guizzo Archela
Danielle is a Lecturer in Economics at University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). She is a member of the INET Young Scholars Initiative, the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) and the Reteaching Economics group.
Duncan McCann
Duncan McCann leads the Digital Economy Programme at the New Economics Foundation in London where his work focuses on analysing changes to the nature of power and accountability due to the digital revolution, and formulating policy proposals that centre people and the environment.
James Trafford
James is Reader in Philosophy and Design at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom UK. His current research is focused on political reasoning, structural injustices, and collective freedom. He has been published in numerous journals, gallery catalogues and design-books, including co-editing the collection of essays Speculative Aesthetics (Urbanomic, 2015), writing Meaning in Dialogue (Springer Press, 2017), and is currently writing a monograph provisionally entitled Militant Reasoning: Politics from Below .
Sharon Wright
Sharon Wright is an international expert in welfare reform and the marketisation of employment services. Her research primarily concerns the lived experiences of policy implementation (user and front-line workers), welfare governance, conditionality, street-level bureaucracy, agency and the active welfare subject. She has been an Expert Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Social Security Committee.
Dalia Gebrial
Dalia is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate at LSE, working on race and gender in the platform economy. She has also recently contributed to and co-edited a volume on Decolonising the University with Gurminder Bhambra and Kerem Nisancioglu.
Diann Bauer
Diann is an artist and writer based in London. She is part of the working group Laboria Cuboniks who in 2015 wrote Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation and the collaborative A.S.T. based in Miami, whose focus is speculative urbanism and climate change. Bauer has screened and exhibited internationally at Tate Britain, the ICA and The Showroom, London, The Sharjah Biennale 13, UAE, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She has taught and lectured widely at universities and cultural institutions including: UCA Epsom, Cornell University, Yale University and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), Goldsmiths, UAL, The Baltic, The Tate and the ICA (UK).
Anna Dent
Anna is an independent public policy consultant and researcher based in Bristol. Her work focuses on employment and skills issues, with particular interests in low paid work and in-work poverty, welfare reform and conditionality, basic income, the changing world of work and the dynamics of policy change. She has worked extensively with local and regional government on strategic change, innovation and devolution, and holds a Masters degree from the University of Bristol, completed as a mature student. She is a fellow of the RSA.
Callum Cant
Callum Cant is a PhD researcher at the University of West London focusing on strike movements in the UK since 2008 and the future of work. He is currently writing a book on Deliveroo (Polity, 2019).
David Frayne
David is a writer and social researcher interested in critical social theory, the sociology of work, consumer culture, political ecology, the sociology of happiness, and utopian studies. His first book, The Refusal of Work, was published by Zed books in 2015. His follow-up, The Work Cure – an edited collection of critical essays on work and health – is published by PCCS.
Kendra Briken
Kendra Briken is a lecturer at Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow. Her current research concerns precarious work in the gig economy and beyond. She is interested in the emerging varieties of automation, the related power structures, and how they are impacting on work and life. Her latest publications include ‘Welcome in the machine. Human-machine relations and knowledge capture‘ In: Capital & Class, and Beyond constrained choice – labour market coercion and oppressive work in Amazon fulfilment centres, Industrial Relations Journal, 49 (5-6), with Phil Taylor.
Matt Cole
Matt is a researcher within the Work and Employment Relations Division of the Leeds University Business School (LUBS) working on the processes and politics of service work. He is the coordinator of the IIPPE Political Economy of Work Group and a member of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association.
Emily Jones
Emily is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex. Emily is a feminist international legal theorist researching on, among other things, automation and military technologies and the role of law and policy in the future of work. Emily has written various publications and co-edited a Special Issue entitled ‘Gender, War and Technology: Peace and Armed Conflict in the 21st Century’.
Jamie Woodcock
Jamie is an independent researcher his current research focuses on digital labour, sociology of work and resistance. His first book Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017) was an ethnographic study of working conditions in call centres in the UK. His most recent work – Marx at the Arcade focuses on the video games industry.
Tom O'Shea
Tom O’Shea is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton. His work focuses mainly on freedom in history, theory, and practice. He also have interests in critical theory, civic republicanism, disability, and the nature of normativity. In much of his research, he draws on the history of philosophy to help make sense of contemporary ethical and political problems. His current research concentrates on three main areas: Civic republicanism, Conscience and Self-legislation.
Patrick Carmichael
Patrick Carmichael is an expert in education systems and the intersection between pedagogy and work. As a teacher, researcher and developer, he has been concerned with critical and emancipatory perspectives on the role of digital technologies in education, training and work. More recently, his research has explored ways in which educational systems and practices might change in in response to changes in the nature and distribution of work. He is currently writing a book about Felix Guattari entitled Education, Inquiry and Activism , which will be published in 2019.
Philipp Frey
Philipp is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). He is interested in critical theory and social philosophy, automation, post-work politics and alternative modes of futuring. In his PhD thesis he deals with the future of work and utopias of automation. Philipp is co-founder and board member of the Zentrum Emanzipatorische Technikforschung (ZET), a progressive technopolitical think tank based in the German-speaking countries.
James Muldoon
James Muldoon leads our Autonomy_Digital strand of research. He is a lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter. His research concerns the history of workers’ movements and democratic socialist politics. He is the author of Building Power to Change the Word: The Political Thought of the German Council Movements and the editor of Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics and The German Revolution and Political Theory. He is currently working on a project on democratising digital platforms.
Autonomy is an accredited ‘4 Day Week’ employer.*
*Each of our full-time staff members work 32-hours per week
Autonomy is a Living Wage employer.