Dr Ned Barker is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Technology in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. With an undergraduate in Sports Coaching Science, MRes in Social Science Research Methods and a PhD in Sociology of Education, his research explores the complex and changing relations between Technology, the Body, and Society.

Prior to joining King's, Ned was a Senior Research Fellow at UCL. Working on the InTouch project (ERC grant), he contributed to research on the social character, sensory textures, and societal impact of touch as it is digitally mediated. Here he led research on robotic touch and interactive skin. He also co-chaired UCL’s Collaborative Social Science Research Domain.

Ned currently leads ‘Biohybrid Bodies’, a project supported by the Leverhulme Trust (2021-24). With interdisciplinary collaborators he has been studying the disruptive potentials of emerging (and future) biohybrid systems across various areas of social life. In 2024 Concordia’s Centre for Sensory Studies and Columbia University’s Digital Futures Institute invited Ned to share insights from this project as a visiting scholar.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Technology and the Body
• Biohybrid Robotics
• Human-Robot Interaction
• Interdisciplinary Approaches
• Collaborative and Sensory Ethnography

Ned welcomes PhD applications related to the broad interests above.

Teaching

Ned’s teaching activities focus on a variety of issues related to digital culture and technology, this currently includes:

• Digital Intimacies
• Digital Cultures and Society
• Digital Media
• Datafication

Expertise and Public Engagement

• Ned organised the public engagement activities of the ‘International Conference on Multimodality: Designing Futures’. These offered students and members of the public opportunities to engage with multimodal film, debates, and installations.
• Ned’s research collaboration with artist Joana Burd resulted in cocreated multi-sensory artworks. These have been publicly exhibited in Paris, London, Barcelona, Oxford, and Brazil.

Selected Publications

• Barker, N., & Burd, J. (2023). Living Capsules: reflections on an ongoing art-sociology collaboration. Leonardo.
• Barker, N., Pervez, A., Wahome, M., McKinlay, A., Al Haj Sleiman, N., Harniess, P., . . . Love Soper, J. (2023). A Collaborative Research Manifesto! An Early Career Response to Uncertainties. International Journal of Social Research Methodology.
• Barker, N., Jewitt, C. (2022). Future touch in industry: exploring sociotechnical imaginaries of robots that feel. Futures.
• Barker, N., Jewitt, C. (2022). Collaborative Robots and Tangled Passages of Tactile-Affects. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.
• Barker, N., Jewitt, C. (2021). Filtering touch: an ethnography of dirt, danger and industrial robots. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23–29.