King's College London

Dr Andrea Ballatore

Cultural Accessibility in the Digital Age  

Dr Andrea Ballatore is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Data Science in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s. His project investigates how digital platforms are reshaping who gets access to culture, where, and in what ways across Europe. The project’s core aim is to understand how cultural participation is organised through the interplay of place, digital infrastructures, and social inequalities, and to make these patterns visible at an unprecedented level of detail. 

The project will develop the first European Cultural Data Map, bringing together large-scale digital traces of cultural activity with spatial analysis to show how cultural opportunities are distributed and experienced across countries, regions, cities, and neighbourhoods. It seeks to help governments, policymakers, cultural organisations, and researchers better understand how cultural inequalities can be addressed rather than reinforced.

Dr Rachael Kent

Digital Health Futures: Wellbeing, Policy & Platforms 

Dr Rachael Kent is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy & Society Education in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s and Co-Director of the Digital Futures Institute’s Centre for Technology and the Body.

Her project examines how digital systems, including social media platforms, wellness apps, search engines, and algorithmic recommendation infrastructures, are reshaping health, identity, and everyday life. Integrating academic research, consultancy practice, and direct policy and legal engagement, the fellowship responds to a growing gap between the influence of digital platforms on wellbeing and society’s capacity to govern them responsibly. Drawing on Dr Kent’s research in The Digital Health Self (2023), her work on health misinformation, and her role as Class Representative in Kent v Apple, the programme approaches digital wellbeing not as an individual lifestyle concern but as a structural, political, and regulatory challenge.

Delivered through CPD and Executive Education pathways, and supported by partnerships with public and private institutions, Digital Health Futures equips professionals, policymakers, organisations, and the wider public with critical frameworks to support more ethical, accountable, and human-centred digital environments, enabling people to live well with the technologies that increasingly shape their lives.

Professor Santiago Sanchez-Pages

Economics and Science Fiction: Imagining Futures of Work and Technology

Professor Santiago Sanchez-Pages is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Political Economy at King’s. His project explores how stories about the future shape how we think about work, markets and technological change.

The project will develop a short, modular course that uses science-fiction books, films and TV series as case studies to examine themes such as automation, inequality, scarcity and post-work futures. It will bring together economics, political economy and cultural analysis to help policy professionals, educators and wider audiences reflect critically and creatively on the societal impact of technological change.

Dr Astrid Van den Bossche

What’s at stake in digital youth & childhoods?  

Dr Astrid Van den Bossche is a Senior Lecturer in Computational Consumer Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s. Her project explores the impact of digital technologies on reshaping young selves.

The project aims to create three short courses that will amount to a certificate in ‘Digital Youth & Childhoods’. Responding to current debates from smartphone bans in schools to the educational value of Minecraft, the project prompts participants to consider what it means to equip children for digital life. By focusing on the relational, cognitive, and material dimensions of children’s digital lives, the courses will encourage participants to question not only what should be safeguarded but also why.