Distinguished Professor Sarah Pink

Research overview

Sarah Pink’s research combines theoretical and methodological scholarship with applied practice. She works across themes including digital media, energy, consumption, everyday life, sustainability, activism, tacit and sensory ways of knowing, safety and health and the construction industry. She researches across urban, domestic and workplace environments.

Her work is often developed through interdisciplinary collaborations across design, engineering and arts disciplines to which she brings social and cultural research expertise. She simultaneously pursues her own theoretical and methodological agenda focusing on media, technologies, embodied ways of knowing and situated processes of change and intervention.

Sarah is a global authority on digital visual and sensory ethnography methodologies. To view one of her recent keynote lectures in this area visit inVisio Inspire Keynote.

Sarah is co-located in the Design Research Institute and connects with the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in the School of Media and Communication. She joined RMIT in 2012 from Loughborough University (UK), where she now holds a part time Professorship of Social Sciences and continues her work as co-investigator leading the ethnographic strands of two interdisciplinary projects:

’Lower effort energy demand reduction’ (EPSRC funded £1.7m). Visit the Low Effort Energy Demand Reducation website for details of the project and investigators.

’Management of OSH in Networked Systems of Production or Service Delivery: Comparisons between Healthcare, Construction and Logistics’, (IOSH funded £299,633) (led by Prof Alistair Gibb).

Since 2005 Sarah has also researched and published on urban activism, media, the global-local, sustainability and wellbeing through her work on the Cittaslow (Slow City) movement in the UK (Nuffield Foundation funded 2005–2007), and in 2011, in Spain (with Prof Lisa Servon, The New School, New York). She is now expanding the global reach of this work to research the development of the Australasian Cittaslow network (with Assoc Professor Tania Lewis at RMIT)

Sarah’s other international roles are as an external lecturer at the Free University in Berlin, Visiting Scholar at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona (2010–2011), and collaborations with a group of scholars from Halmstad and Lund Universities in Sweden, through the WITS (Wellbeing through Innovation in Technology and Society) group at Halmstad University, where she was Senior Advisor to the ’Plan for mobilizing social science’ (2011). She is also Honorary Professor at the CPCI at Griffith University and elected to the Executive Board of the International Visual Sociology Association to 2012.

Research supervision

Sarah is an experienced research supervisor. She can consider proposals from potential research students in any of her areas of expertise outlined above. This includes interdisciplinary projects, purely academic research, work that links applied and academic scholarship and practice led research. She is also an experienced Examiner of Doctoral research in these areas.

• PhD and a BA(Hons) (first class) in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent (UK)

• MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester (UK)