Patrik Dahl

Overview

I am a Teaching Associate in the School of Social Sciences and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Geography and Planning. My research explores socio-technical change at the intersection of data, artificial intelligence, interaction, and the ways in which digital technologies are imagined, presented, and evaluated. I am particularly interested in how technologies are pitched, demonstrated, and positioned as solutions to social problems, and in the socio-technical futures imagined through these practices.

I am a Research Assistant on TITAN, a Horizon Europe and Innovate UK–funded project examining how digital and data-driven technologies can enhance transparency in the food system and inform policy.

My doctoral research, 'Solving Social Problems with Data', examined how data-based technologies are positioned as 'solutions' to social problems, with a focus on pitch presentations and imagined socio-technical futures in hackathon competitions.

My broader interests include qualitative and ethnographic methods, emerging technologies, and human–machine interaction, including large language model (LLM) interfaces. My work has appeared in Discourse & Communication (SAGE), The American Sociologist (Springer), and Berliner Journal für Soziologie (Springer). I have also recently published a monograph entitled Digital Society, Interaction Order and Automation with William Housley. I am associate editor of Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research.