A.R.E. Taylor

A.R.E. Taylor is a social anthropologist based at the University of Exeter. He works at the intersection of digital and space anthropology, media archaeology, and the history of technology. His research concentrates on the material and temporal dimensions of data storage and security. He conducted his fieldwork in data centres across the UK and Europe, exploring how data centre security and resilience is enacted in practice. He is also interested in the social, material and environmental costs of cloud infrastructure and has acted as a consultant and advisor on these issues for a range of organisations, including the United Nations, Mozilla, the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ABC News. He is an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology and a founding member of the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) Network, a research network joining social scientists working on topics related to Outer Space. He is also a founder of the Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group, a cross-disciplinary research network that brings scholars together with industry leaders, security practitioners and policymakers to explore critical infrastructure protection in relation to emerging global catastrophic risks. His work has been funded by the Royal Anthropological Institute, The Royal Geographical Society and the ESRC, among others, and his articles have appeared in journals such as The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ephemera and Culture Machine.

His research interests include: data, technology, futures, outer space, techno-apocalyptic narratives, digital preservation, pre-digital nostalgia, critical infrastructure protection and existential risk.