Nancy Mauro-Flude

Dr Nancy Mauro-Flude is an internationally recognised design anthropologist and creative practice researcher whose work advances network infrastructures, computing arts, and feminist-led technological governance. She provides sustained research leadership in the development of cooperative, artist-held digital ordinances that integrate performing arts, open-source software, and low-energy wireless infrastructures. Her work is distinguished by the design and deployment of hand-coded, Linux-based mesh networks that position computation as a cultural, ecological, and political practice. Her long-standing commitment to free software, feminist–anarchist server communities, and post-carbon approaches to planetary computation, seed the ground for Earthothers to flourish.

  Nancy’s transdisciplinary scholarship spans social innovation, critical theory, aesthetics, and spatial practice. Her research outputs are demonstrated in publications such as Thinking with Shells: Decolonising Digital Culturescapes (2025), Writing the Feminist Internet (2024), Caring About the Vast Horizon (2022), Performing with the Aether (2020), Methodologies of Risk (2017). Alongside peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, curated research exhibitions, and internationally presented practice-based research. Her work demonstrates a cumulative research trajectory with sustained impact across creative practice, media theory, and infrastructure studies.

 

Nancy lectures in the design justice, philosophy of technology, spatial practices, and feminist Science Technology and Society studies. Her heuristic critiques contribute to maturing discussions around embodied cognition, data fiction and flora fauna and the materiality of computation.

 

She is particularly interested in working with people who have lived experience of low socio-economic, remote, isolated and underserved regions.

 

As RMIT Regenerative Future Fellow she codesigns transdisciplinary courseware for delivery across the colleges, to undergraduate and postgraduate students and to learners in cross-sector contexts. Nancy leads studio curricula for the Master of Design Innovation and Technology (MDIT) cohort. Nancy is a senior supervisor to an exceptional cohort of Higher Degree Researchers, some of who are affiliated to the global Practice Based Research Symposium, | Digital Ethnography Research Centre  | Post carbon research.  | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S)

 

Nancy is the founder of espX – the Ecofeminist Studio for Permacomputing,, providing an international platform for research, pedagogy, and practice in low-energy computing cultures. She also serves as co-founder and Secretary of the Community Network Infrastructures Special Interest Group of the Internet Society. contributing to global policy conversations on community-centred connectivity and digital infrastructure governance.