Susan Halford
I have a backround in Geography (which I studied at the University of Sussex 1981-4) and Urban Studies (also at Sussex 1985-1990) and moved into Sociology when I joined the University of Southampton in 1992. My PhD launched me onto a series of research projects on the gendered nature of working lives and organizations - published in articles and books including Gender, Careers and Organizations (1996, with Mike Savage and Ann Witz), Gender, Power and Organizations (2001, with Pauline Leonard) and Negotiating Gendered Identities at Work (2006, with Pauline Leonard).
Processes of organizational change ran strongly throughout this work, and about 10 years ago I began to explore how digital technologies were changing work and working lives. This led me to a series of research collaborations with colleagues in Northern Norway, working in and around the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine in Tromso and, via this circuitous route, to connections with Computer Scientists at Southampton! In 2008 we put together our successful application for the Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science and in 2009 launched the first UK MSc in Web Science.
Pioneering the development of Web Science at Southampton has been a very exciting new phase of my academic career and led me in all sorts of new and unexpected directions, for example - thinking about the politics of data and artefacts in linked data and the semantic web (Halford, Pope and Weal, 2012, in Sociology) and how social scientists and computer scientists can work together to develop theories and methods with which to tackle big data (Twitter in this case, Tinati, Halford, Carr and Pope, article to be published in Sociology).
This MOOC is another stage in the adventure. Planning and filming the course has been hard work, stressful at times and great fun! It has also been an enormous priviledge to work with such an enthusiastic and talented team. I am really looking forward to our launch on 11th November as we use the Web to bring Southampton's Web Science to the world ... and to seeing what the world does with it!
