For contact and collaboration: info [at] autonomy.work

Our Team

Will Stronge

Will is Autonomy’s Director. 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

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

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.

Cleo Goodman

Cleo is Autonomy’s basic income lead. She co-founded the Basic Income Conversation project in 2019 and has facilitated hundreds of conversations with people across the UK – communities, politicians, policy makers and academics – with the goal of securing a basic income for all.

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

Working time consultancy team

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

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

Data Unit

Lukas Kikuchi

Lukas is a specialist in stochastic processes, large deviations theory and statistical physics – holding a PhD from Cambridge University. He is the Director of the Autonomy Data Unit (ADU), which produces cutting-edge data analysis and visualisation on the present and future of our economies.

lukas [at] autonomy.work

Sean Greaves

Sean has experience as an ML Solutions Engineer in corporate and start-up environments and has worked closely with organisations such as Bellingcat and the Strelka Institute. He is part of Autonomy’s Data Unit and will be exploring the potential of AI for progressive change.

sean [at] autonomy.work

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.

Liam Mullally

Liam is a CHASE funded PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests include digital culture, the history of computing, information theory, glitch studies, and the politics and philosophy of noise. Previously he has worked as a copywriter and tech journalist. He is working on several projects with Autonomy, from skills commissions to policy strategy.

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.