David Young is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities. His research focuses on software politics and digital war, investigative aesthetics, and Cold War histories of computational media. He is currently leading the AHRC Catalyst-funded research project "Assembling Certainty", which examines how accounts of war are produced using “open sources” in visual investigations and critically explores the implications of machine learning in civilian casualty recording.

He teaches subjects at BA and PG level on subjects including global digital cities, design and protest aesthetics, videogames and politics, and the theory and practice of data visualisation. He is currently supervising PhD projects in areas such as interactive documentary and anti-disinformation activism, worker microresistances to AI, and shifting aesthetics of observational filmmaking since 9/11.

He completed a PhD in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham. He holds a Master’s degree in Networked Media from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and a BA in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Digital warfare and propaganda, data politics and critical information design, histories of computing, media art and videogames, critical theory and software studies.

Teaching

Software politics in global digital cities, aesthetics of resistance in protest movements, critical information design and data visualisation, digital gaming, histories of new media and networked culture.

Selected publications

• Young, D., & Docherty, N. (2024). An anticipatory regime of multiplanetary life: on SpaceX, Martian colonisation and terrestrial ruin. Science as Culture, 34(2), 168–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2024.2393096
• Young, D. (2021). Sensors, interpreters, analysts: operating the ‘electronic barrier’ during the Vietnam War. Digi War 2, 51–63. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-021-00033-2