April 2026

Presentations

Beyond the artifact: AI and the future of research — A keynote for the 44th Annual Conference of the Physiotherapy Research Society. Argues that AI is now in contact with every part of the research process, and that the useful question is no longer whether researchers are using AI, but what they are using it for. Uses the PhD as a worked example to explore the difference between the artefact and the person becoming capable through the process, and argues that as AI becomes more capable, specifically human contributions — research taste, evaluative judgement, and the capacity to set direction — become more valuable, not less.
What is the work? — A keynote for the Royal College of Nursing's Education conference. Examines how generative AI has severed the inferential chain between assessment artifacts and the learning they were meant to evidence, and what nursing education needs to do structurally in response. The argument moves from the current AI landscape, through the premises of nursing formation, to why discursive responses (policies, declarations) cannot address a structural problem.

Posts

The PhD is a process of becoming: Reimagining AI and PhD assessment — AI has disrupted doctoral education in two ways: the immediate question of AI-assisted writing, and the deeper question of what the PhD means when AI can conduct research from scratch. This post argues that the thesis was always a proxy for the person; evidence of an identity shift, not the thing being assessed in its own right.
An open scholarship workflow: What academic publishing can learn from open source — Academic publishing treats scholarship as a finished, individually owned artefact. This post describes a writing and publishing workflow built on a different premise: that a scholarly corpus could work like an open source project — readable, contributable, forkable, and never permanently owned by anyone.

Notes

Developing AI literacy — Developing AI literacy is not skill accumulation but a progressive deepening of engagement — from substitution through adaptation to transformation — requiring authentic use, deliberate reflection, and sufficient foundational orientation.
Research taste — Research taste is the cultivated capacity to recognise which problems are worth pursuing, which collaborators will amplify your work, and which under-explored areas have genuine leverage — before you can fully prove any of those judgements.
YAML — YAML is a human-readable format for storing structured data as plain text. In knowledge management and publishing workflows, it appears most commonly as the frontmatter block at the top of markdown files, where it holds metadata — title, author, date, tags — that tools can read without parsing the document itself.
Distributed version control — Distributed version control is an approach to tracking file changes where every contributor holds a complete copy of the repository and its full history, rather than depending on a central server. It enables offline work, parallel development, and resilience against data loss.
Git — Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes to files over time. It records who changed what and when, allows you to move between earlier and later states of a project, and lets multiple people work on the same files without overwriting each other's contributions.
Research industrial complex — The research industrial complex describes the self-reinforcing system of incentives across universities, funding bodies, journals, and publishers that rewards publication volume and impact metrics over meaningful scientific progress. The term draws on Eisenhower's military-industrial complex to highlight how interconnected institutional interests can sustain a system that actively works against its own stated mission.