Liz McFall is Director of Data Civics Observatory at Edinburgh Futures Institute and Personal Chair in the Sociology of Markets. She is an interdisciplinary sociologist with research interests that cross the social studies of insurance, cultural economy and market studies.
Her recent research explores historical, spatial and infrastructural connections between institutional investment, urban governance and everyday social life. This informs the Data Civics programme and its emphasis on using digital ethnography to investigate the social, political, cultural and economic dimensions of civic planning and placemaking.
Prior to joining Edinburgh Futures Institute, Liz spent most of her career at the Open University, producing multi-media teaching and learning including text, film, audio and online resources. That, together with experience as Academic Consultant on several Open University/ BBC co-productions, left her fascinated with the role of film in expressing academic ideas. She has continued to work with film, primarily in collaboration with artist filmmaker Sapphire Goss, as a producer and scriptwriter since joining Edinburgh. The results, including Closes and Opens: a history of Edinburgh’s Futures and Milton Keynes of the Mind, can be seen on the YouTube Channel.
Liz is founding editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy. She has published several articles in journals including Economy and Society, Sociological Review, Science, Technology and Human Value and Big Data and Society and is the author of Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending (Routledge 2014) Advertising: a cultural economy (Sage 2004) and, with Franck Cochoy and Joe Deville, edited the collection Markets and the Arts of Attachment (Routledge 2017).
