Beth Kewell

Beth Kewell joined Exeter Business School in October 2018 as a Research Fellow allied to the Initiative for the Digital Economy at Exeter, INDEX. Beth specialises in interpretative research, positioned at the boundary between innovation management, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and risk analysis. She has previously held posts at the University of Surrey, the University of Stavanger in Norway, the University of York, and Bristol Business School (the University of the West of England).

Beth’s current work for INDEX draws on the methodological, epistemic and ethical insights acquired from engaging with the risks – and interpretative challenges- raised by the introduction of digital techniques and technologies into expert contexts and knowledge cultures, including those allied to business. Thus far, Beth’s work for INDEX has focused on interpreting expectations of blockchain adoption and the kinds of technoscientific imagining this involves, including those related to constructs of social good (Kewell and Ward, 2017; Kewell, Adams and Parry, 2017). Most recently, Beth has contributed to thought experiments concerning the future of money, personal data, privacy and the emergence of a digital literacy divide that places these three considerations in a new alignment, raising issues of note for social scientists, theorists of business, and analysts of the Risk Society.

Beth’s past engagement with Risk Society topics includes a co-authored archival study of UK Public Inquiries into iatrogenic incidents in the National Health Service (Kewell and Beck, 2008a) and a modal analysis of reports allied to the BSE Inquiry (Kewell and Beck, 2008b). While employed at the University of York, Beth co-investigated a European Union-funded project (REMeDiE) concerning the growth and sustainability of stem cell science and the Regenerative Medicine industry (Kewell, 2013; Kewell and Beck 2011; Kewell et al., 2011).

In 2014, Beth co-authored a monograph for World Scientific Publishing on the intellectual and epistemological history of risk entitled Risk: A Study of Its Origins, History and Politics (with Matthias Beck).