Dr Suneel Jethani is a Senior Lecturer in Digital and Social Media in the School of Communication at UTS. Suneel has a PhD from the University of Melbourne which examined self-tracking technology and other elements of data-driven culture. It mapped the cumulative impact of capturing data about health and behaviour across various everyday contexts and found that paradoxes of control and freedom associated with data-capturing technology can be used to inform established design methodologies in insightful ways.

Prior to his career as an academic, Suneel worked in the academic publishing industry and in open data policy reform for the Victorian Government’s Department of Premier and Cabinet in the Digital Design and Innovation Branch (2017-2020). During this time, he conducted first of its kind qualitative, interview-based, research with members of the public sector and its adjacent communities of practice into the perception of risks and opportunities associated with sharing and releasing open government data. This work has been published as a book, Openness in Practice: Understanding Attitudes to Open Government Data (2021, Palgrave, coauthored with Dr Dale Leorke).

Suneel has three primary research interests. The first is concerned with the complex and contradictory ways that digital and data capturing technologies are integrated into everyday life with an emphasis on the way they transform relations of space, time and the body. His chapter in the volume, Embodied Computing edited by Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis (2020, MIT Press) titled ‘Doing Time in the Home-Space’ challenged the idea that ankle monitors are a humane and empowering alternative to incarceration by tracing their development over multiple socio-technical trajectories. The chapter proposed a methodological approach that anticipates how the functionality of these devices creeps into non-punitive, domestic settings. His essay in The Griffith Review’s Leisure Principle issue (August, 2023) explored the use of ‘always on’ devices arguing that they alter human relations to time and work making the boundaries between them porous and confusing.