Position/Status

Research Associate

E-mail Address

db889@cam.ac.uk

Phone

+ 44 (0)1223

Qualifications

• PhD in Sociological Research (University of Essex)
• MA Media, Culture and Communication (Institute of Education, UCL)
• BA (Hons) Graphic Design (Camberwell College of Arts, UAL)
• BTEC Diploma in Art & Design (Chelsea College of Arts & Design, UAL)
• Diploma di Istruzione Liceale Scientifica - Liceo Scientifico G. Ulivi, Parma, Italy

Membership of Professional Bodies/Associations

• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Profile

Daniela is a Research Associate at the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public. Her research explores creative ways to bring scientists and the public together to debate social and ethical issues related to scientific discovery and technological innovation.

Daniela has fifteen years of experience in academia and the creative sector. She completed her PhD in Sociological Research at the University of Essex in 2019. Funded by the CHASE AHRC scholarship, Daniela used medical archives, ethnographic methods and interviews with experts to investigate the production, use and debates of the historical evidence-base on HPV and cervical cancer prevention. Between 2021 and 2022, Daniela worked as a Research Assistant on the CancerScreen project, for which she examined the production of the evidence-base on new screening technologies against colorectal cancer. The project was led by Dr Stuart Hogarth from the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge.

Before joining academia, Daniela worked as a visual and participatory designer. She developed creative and inclusive co-creation practices which brought together community groups, artists, town planners and local politicians to discuss pressing issues around regeneration programmes, through cutting-edge technologies and collective data visualisations. Examples are: the school design workshops with the Sorrell Foundation and the University of the Arts London’s Joined-Up-Design-for-School programme (2005-2006), the three large-scale participatory emotion mapping projects in collaboration with artist Christian Nold - the Stockport Emotion Map (UK, 2007), the Brentford Biopsy (UK, 2008) and the Sensing the Future of Hedeusene project (DK, 2009); and the Doomsday Blockchain project together with digital artists Alexei Blinow, James Stevens, Christian Nold and Collusion Cambridge (UK, 2019).

Daniela has a long-standing commitment to education. Between 2010 and 2015, Daniela worked for the publisher Penguin Random House in the Knowledge Division of Dorling Kindersley, for which she designed several science books for young audiences. In 2014, Daniela thought undergraduate seminar classes on media and society in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, which were informed by her own creative practice and her post-graduate research on the role of digital technology in children's and young people's learning. In 2015, she received professional accreditation as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Academy.

Academic Area/Links

• Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public
• Engagement and Society, Wellcome Connecting Science
• Research and Dialogue, Wellcome Connecting Science and Sanger Institute

Research Topics

• Sociology, STS, history and philosophy of science
• Social and ethical implications of scientific discovery and technological innovation 
• Art, Design and Science
• Bottom-up public engagement
• Qualitative and creative research methods

Current Research Project(s)

• Qualitative study of creative engagement with science
• Qualitative analysis of bibliometric data on screening tests against colorectal cancer (with Dr. Stuart Hogarth, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge)

Teaching

• Postgraduate
  • I will be teaching and supervising students in the areas related to my research topics

Principal and Recent Publications

Academic publications

Boraschi, D. (2016) Review of Roy Dilley and Thomas G. Kirsch (eds.). Regimes of ignorance: anthropological perspectives on the production and reproduction of non-knowledge; New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (2015). JASO online, 3(2), 287 [online].

Selwyn, N., Boraschi, D. and Özkula, S. (2009). Drawing digital pictures: an investigation of primary pupils’ representations of ICT and schools. British Educational Research Journal, 35 (6), 909-928. doi: 10.1080/01411920902834282.

Book design

English for Everyone Course Book Level 4 Advanced: A Complete Self-Study Programme (2016) DK. Penguin Random House

Heads Up Philosophy (2014) DK. Penguin Random House

Knowledge Encyclopaedia: The World as You've Never Seen It Before (2013) DK. Penguin Random House

Human Body: a Children’s Encyclopaedia (2012) DK. Penguin Random House

Cool Tech: Gadgets, Games, Robots and the Digital World (2011) DK. Penguin Random House

Participatory new media art projects

Doomsday Blockchain (2018-19) DDBC Collective and Collusion, Cambridge, UK

Sensing the Future of Hedehusene (2009) Softhook Design and the Copenhagen International Theatre, Copenhagen, DK.

Stockport Emotion Map (2007) Softhook Design, Stockport, UK