Susan Halford

Susan Halford is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton and Co-director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol. She co-founded the Web Science Institute and specializes in the politics and practices of digital data, infrastructures, and artifacts.

• Key research areas include sociomaterial practices in semantic Web development, epistemological politics of AI, and critical data infrastructure studies.

Her work with semantic linked data and symbolic AI demonstrates the contested processes of knowledge representation at scale. She led an interdisciplinary project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council to model social class, aging, and health through semantic Web tools. This research revealed tensions between theoretical rigor and pragmatic computational limitations in ontology design and temporal reasoning.

• Scientific awards: Economic and Social Research Council grant ES/M0003809/1.