I was born in Ireland, and moved to Luxembourg when I was four. Later on, I completed my secondary education and first degree in the UK. I lived in Malaysia from 2002 to 2018, when I moved to the UK.
After my first degree from the University of Glasgow, I moved to Belgium and worked for five years in customer service and marketing – mostly in the electronics and IT industry. I came to the realisation that this was not the career path for me, but I became very interested in the ways in which technology and culture interact with changing social and economic patterns.
I completed a Masters in the Social Anthropology of Development at SOAS in 2001, where I also met my future partner in life. After graduating and working in Nigeria for six months, I moved to Malaysia and started teaching at a college.
I was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 2012, for ethnographic research into the monetisation of personal blogging in Malaysia. Since then, I worked as Lecturer and researcher at Monash University Malaysia and continued research in the field of social media – looking at blogging, WhatsApp, Snapchat and other everyday uses of social media in Malaysia. My methodological approach focuses on inductive theory generation by combining the quantitative and qualitative traditions.
I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Communication in 2018, but for family reasons we moved to the UK. I am currently affiliated with Monash University Malaysia as Adjunct Senior Research Fellow.
Since 2019 I have embarked on a new career path, working as a Learning Technologist in Glasgow – first in the City of Glasgow College, and now at the College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow. This role requires a combination of teaching experience and pedagogical awareness, using and exploring different types of software, and sociotechnology in everyday life – as educators navigate the often stressful integration of technology into their professional life. As part of my professional development I have been accredited as a Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology (CMALT).
For more details, please look at the Bio and Publications page