Judith Aston

Associate Member

Judith is a specialist in digital media practice and cross-cultural communication. She holds a PhD in computer-related design from the Royal College of Art and a Masters degree in the social sciences from the University of Cambridge. Her teaching and research interests look at the inter-relationships between sound, text and image within digital media and at the possibilities of digital media for communicating multiple points of view.

She began producing digital work with the BBC and Cambridge University in the mid-1980s and has worked across academia and industry ever since. This includes work with Apple Computing, IBM, the BBC, Virgin Publishing, Cambridge Multimedia, Oxford University, the University of Kent and the University of Colorado. She has also been a new media consultant to the Soros Open Society Institute in Budapest and the recipient of an AHRC small research grant.

Her work has brought her into contact with a variety of people, from museum archivists and factory workers through to Tuareg nomads and Tibetan monks. In 2003, she was co-organiser of a fringe workshop on alternative approaches to digital storytelling at the International Digital Storytelling Conference held in Cardiff, where she presented the practice-based component to her PhD research on digital media and the anthropology of emotion.

Judith's current research involves a collaboration with an Oxford anthropologist to explore innovative ways of using digital media to present memories and emotions relating to a long term study of cultural change. She will give a keynote address on Spatial Montage and Anthropological Discourse at a forthcoming symposium in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, Spring 2006, and is an invited speaker on the theme of Landscape, Language and Memory at a forthcoming symposium organized by LAND2 in Spring 2006.

Judith Aston
e-mail: judith.aston@uwe.ac.uk