I am a multidisciplinary sociology lecturer working at the intersection of STS and HCI, focusing on digital criminology, surveillance, and technology-related harms. My research examines how emerging technologies—particularly frontier artificial intelligence, extended reality (XR), and networked sensing systems—reshape crime, justice, and social control in increasingly hybrid digital–physical environments ("onlife").

My work develops critical frameworks for understanding “onlife” harms, trivial surveillance, and bystander data capture, with a focus on how everyday technologies normalise new forms of visibility, profiling, and inequality. I am particularly interested in the governance, ethical, and criminological implications of immersive and AI-driven systems operating in public and domestic spaces.

I was Principal Investigator on a Scottish Government–funded national review of Public Space CCTV in Scotland (2022–23) and am currently Co-Investigator on the UKRI-funded DAARC project (Design Against Augmented Reality Crime), which explores the criminogenic risks of immersive technologies and contributes to harm-reduction-by-design approaches.

My monograph, Onlife Criminology: Virtual Crimes and Real Harms (Bristol University Press, 2025), advances a new theoretical framework for analysing crime and harm beyond the online/offline divide. Alongside my research, I have convened the MSc Digital Society at Glasgow and led postgraduate teaching on digital harms, surveillance, and critical technological futures.

My research focuses on the criminological study of digital technologies, surveillance, and emerging forms of harm in everyday life. I examine how AI-enabled, immersive, and networked technologies—such as smart domestic devices, augmented and virtual reality, and the Internet of Things—reshape experiences of safety, privacy, control, and vulnerability across both public and private spaces.

A central concern of my work is how crime, harm, and governance increasingly unfold in hybrid digital–physical environments, often described as “onlife” contexts. I explore how technologies designed for convenience, care, or security can enable subtle and cumulative forms of surveillance, coercion, and social sorting, particularly through ambient data capture and algorithmic decision-making that remain largely invisible to users and bystanders.

My research brings together digital criminology, surveillance studies, and cultural sociology, with a strong emphasis on justice, accountability, and trust. I am particularly interested in how emerging technologies challenge existing legal and regulatory frameworks, and how new forms of harm—such as algorithmic bias, immersive manipulation, and bystander surveillance — often fall outside conventional criminal justice responses.

Methodologically, I use qualitative and interdisciplinary approaches, including ethnographic research, creative and design-based methods, and public engagement experiments, to make hidden technological infrastructures visible and open to critique. Across my work, I aim to develop criminological frameworks that are both theoretically rigorous and relevant to policy, regulation, and public debate around digital technologies.

Keywords: surveillance, digital criminology, AI ethics, Actor-Network Theory, obfuscation, XR, breaching experiments, IoT, ambient harm, techno-sociology, trust, digital inequality

Research groups

• Criminology

List by: Type | Date

• In July 2022, I successfully obtained funding for a 7-month contract with the Government of Scotland. Our study studied the utilization and effects of Public Space Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) through a comprehensive survey and qualitative walking interviews conducted in collaboration with various Local Authorities and Police Divisions across Scotland. As the Principal Investigator (PI), my team and I compared the findings with those from other regions in the UK and Denmark.
• Along with my colleagues Dr Mark McGill (School of Computing Science, Glasgow) and Dr Richard Jones (University of Edinburgh), we have secured funding from REPHRAIN (National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online) for a project on DAARC (Design Against Augmented Reality Crime) (2024-2025)

I am particularly keen in supervising dissertations in novel criminological frontiers such as

• hybrid on/off line reality
• obfuscation, surveillance and data-profiling
• sociological and criminological implications of the Sars-Cov-19 pandemic
• AI and crime prevention
• Smart devices and smart environments
• cyber harm and cybersecurity
• Web Toxicity
• Deepfakes, Bots & Weaponization of Media

Covid and cybercrime;

NFT cyberfrauds via online ethnography

Discourse analysis of media moral panicking

Modules that I Teach on:

• 2021; 2022: Understanding & Explaining Crime (Convener)
• 2022; 2023; 2025: Criminological Theory in Context (Convener)
• 2022; 2023; 2026: MSc Criminology Methods Lab ( Dissertations Convener)
• 2023; 2025: Digital Societies: Theories and Substantive Issues (Convener)

Previous Teaching Experience:

• Sociology of Media
• Anthropology of Social Control
• Law, Crime & Societies

Prizes, awards & distinctions

• 2025: Shortlisted 'Mobile With Monsters' (SPS Teaching Awards)

Grant committees & research advisory boards

• 2022 - 2023: Scottish Goverment,
• 2024 - 2025: REPHRAIN,

Editorial boards

• 2022: International Political Anthropology
• 2017 - 2020: Irish Anthropological Association

Selected international presentations

• 2023: SocInfo (University of Glasgow)
• 2024: Lectio Magistralis on Metamorphosis: AI and threat to Democracy (University of Pisa)
• 2023: Digital Society & Economy IRT (University of Glasgow)
• 2025: Digital Humanities in Practise (University of Glasgow)

Other than academic publications, I have contributed on magazines and newspapers in both English and Italian. I regularly contribute on the blog 'HYPERMODERNITY'.