Dr Mark Cassidy
Job Title
Research Fellow
Room number
2.81Building (Address)
Old Surgeons HallStreet (Address)
High School YardsCity (Address)
EdinburghPost code (Address)
EH1 1LZResearch interests
Research interests
My research interests centre around the intersections of social and cultural concerns with those of the material and technical, especially where these involve technological change and transition. My work aims to contribute to foregrounding the importance of the social, cultural and contextual relations required if research knowledge is to make that difficult transition from the laboratory to real world deployment. This also encompasses where new technologies, practices and policies potentially lead to emergence of or shifts in knowledge communities, and the potential implications these have for the roles and place of undocumented and tacit knowledges and learning often located within practices of processing, manufacturing and deployment.
I am currently working across two InFrame Research Culture Catalyst projects which finish in June 2026. One led by Prof. Niki Vermeulen out of Science Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) investigating cultural barriers faced by first generation and working-class academics. The other, managed out of Edinburgh by Prof. Sarah Cunningham-Burley out of the Usher Institute and led by Prof. Anne Kerr of University of Glasgow, takes ethnographic approaches to investigate how shared facilities and spaces shape research cultures.
Previous projects have involved the study of the sociotechnical relationships around industrial decarbonisation. In particular how communities and industries engaged with one another around issues of decarbonisation and how these relations created both opportunities and barriers towards better use of energy resources. With my colleagues Prof Steve Yearley and Dr Kyle Parker, we were part of a UK wide research project called TransFIRe (Transforming the Foundation Industries Research and Innovation Hub), which was looking into ways to reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes, as well as finding new ways of taking advantage of industrial activity for the benefit of the communities in which they are based.
Background
I am a transdisciplinary researcher focussed on sociotechnical relationships around energy, materials, society, and technological change. I am originally from a materials processing background with 25 years research and development experience on energy materials. During this time, I worked across a range of industrial and academic environments. In 2017 I took a decision to move beyond the technical and widen my engagement with broader issues around energy transitions, gaining an MSc in Energy Society and Sustainability and a second PhD in the History of Technology. My shift in disciplines was motivated by a growing concern that in the case of technological transitions a good technology alone was not enough. As a result, my work has moved towards social sciences and environmental humanities, aiming to better engage with the social, cultural and contextual relations which are deeply rooted within practices, perceptions and engagement around technological transitions. This formed the underpinnings of my PhD in History, where I investigated how promissory technologies are mobilised by various groups to build technological optimism, so sustaining expectation, legitimacy and support against changing policy and social contexts.
My research practice tends towards historically informed STS, engaging with transition theories such as Multi Level Perspective, Technological Innovation Systems, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Contextual Logics. I utilise a mix of qualitative, ethnographic methods, augmented by engagement with primary and secondary archival literatures drawing from technical, policy, academic and grey texts.