Founded in 2018 by design and futures anthropologist Professor Sarah Pink, ETLab is an interdisciplinary and international research community, widely recognised as a pioneer in methodological innovation. A method at the core of many of its projects is the use of video to produce new ways of knowing, understanding, and sharing research.
During her stay, Sara engaged with visual ethnography and joined a seminar on documentary filmmaking, where scholars including Jeni Lee and Sarah Pink discussed editing styles and practices - underscoring how central editing is to storytelling. She now intends to use visual ethnography as a methodological approach in her doctoral research.
Sara also joined the ADM+S and was a visitor at RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). ADM+S is a crossdisciplinary, national research centre that aims to create the knowledge and strategies necessary for responsible, ethical, and inclusive automated decision-making.Among other activities, she joined the ADM+S Summer School. Over four days, she took part in workshops, mentoring sessions, and social activities, building connections across the Centre and sharpening her conceptual approach. One workshop, led by Kimberlee Weatherall and focusing on different governance modes for the regulation of emerging technologies such as communicative AI, was particularly relevant.
While regulation is often associated with laws, soft laws, and standards, the workshop included exercises exploring other modes of regulation and emphasised that there are many regulatory tools that nations can draw on, such as nodality. This refers to the government’s position at the centre of social networks, allowing it to collect and distribute information via campaigns, benchmarking, and nudges. The concept offered a useful lens for Sara’s research on
how actors such as policymakers anticipate communicative AI as linked to care.
She concluded her stay by participating in a two-day symposium, “Anticipatory Infrastructures”. The event was hosted by ETLab (Monash University) and co-organised by the Academy of Mobility Humanities (Konkuk University). The symposium brought together social science, arts, and humanities researchers working with the concept of anticipatory infrastructures - the idea that almost all infrastructures are not only highly anticipated (loaded with promise and expectation as (infra)structures of feeling), but also anticipate making something possible (for example, new forms of care). Infrastructures also mediate temporalities through their material legacies, shaping the affordances around which futures are anticipated.
In line with this concept, Sara joined a panel on care and presented a draft paper co-authored with Juliane Jarke, titled “Communicative AI as Anticipatory Infrastructures of Care Futures”. Her research stay was financially supported by Smart Regulation, alongside the ComAI project and Land Steiermark.
About Sara Skardelly
Sara Skardelly is a PhD researcher at the University of Graz, affiliated with the Department of Sociology and the Center for Data Science in Business and Society. She is also an associated member of the Field of Excellence “Smart Regulation”. Her research explores the intersection of emerging technologies
(especially communicative AI), infrastructures, and care, with a focus on anticipations and narratives. Her current work also engages with creative methods (especially erasure poetry and participatory filmmaking) within social research. She is also a member of the ComAI research unit and the Graz Sociodigital and Participatory Futures Studio.