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Research Visit to the Emerging Technologies Lab and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society

Earlier this year, Sara Skardelly, from the subproject “Health: Caring through ComAI”, spent six weeks as a PhD visitor at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab (ETLab) at Monash University and joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). The visit strengthened her methodological toolkit in visual ethnography and deepened her engagement with debates on responsible and inclusive automated decision-making.

Founded in 2018 by design and futures anthropologist Professor Sarah Pink, ETLab is an interdisciplinary and international research community, widely recognised as a pioneer in methodological innovation. A method at the core of many of its projects is the use of video to produce new ways of knowing, understanding, and sharing research.

During her stay, Sara engaged with visual ethnography and joined a seminar on documentary filmmaking, where scholars including Jeni Lee and Sarah Pink discussed editing styles and practices – underscoring how central editing is to storytelling. She now intends to use visual ethnography as a methodological approach in her doctoral research.

Sara also joined the ADM+S, which is a cross-disciplinary, national research centre that aims to create the knowledge and strategies necessary for responsible, ethical, and inclusive automated decision- making.

Among other activities, she joined the ADM+S Summer School. Over four days, she took part in workshops, mentoring sessions, and social activities, building connections across the Centre and sharpening her conceptual approach. One workshop, led by Kimberlee Weatherall and focusing on different governance modes for the regulation of emerging technologies such as communicative AI, was particularly relevant.

While regulation is often associated with laws, soft laws, and standards, the workshop included exercises exploring other modes of regulation and emphasised that there are many regulatory tools that nations can draw on, such as nodality. This refers to the government’s position at the centre of social networks, allowing it to collect and distribute information via campaigns, benchmarking, and nudges. The concept offered a useful lens for Sara’s research on how actors such as policymakers anticipate communicative AI as linked to care.

Her research stay was financially supported by ComAI, alongside the Smart Regulation and Land Steiermark.