Joe Deville is a Senior Lecturer based jointly in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology and the Department of Sociology. His research interests include: 

• Scholarly publishing and open access infrastructures
• The everyday, embodied life of debt, credit and finance
• Autonomous systems, methods of algorithmic prediction, futures of credit scoring
• Science and technology studies, speculative sociology, non-representational theory

Mastodon: joe_dev@mastodon.social

X: @joe_dev

I am looking to supervise students interested in engaging critically with some of the following empirical areas: household economies, everyday indebtedness, AI/data proliferation/informational mobilities, disaster/disaster preparedness, infrastructures of scholarly communication. Theoretically and methodologically I draw influences from fields including science and technology studies, affect theory, economic sociology, and sociologies of the digital.

A key area of focus has been Open Access publishing and the politics of scholarly communication. I am particularly interested in researching and building the infrastructures, workflows and communities needed to change how scholarly knowledge circulates.

I am currently exploring these challenges as Principal Investigator of the Open Book Futures project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund, and running from May 2023 until April 2026. This project follows directly from the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project which ran from November 2019 to April 2023, on which I was a Co-Investigator and which was supported by the same two funders.

In both these projects, the focus has been on ways to deliver a fairer more sustainable future for Open Access book publishing. I became interested in this work as an editor and co-founder of the small Open Access book publisher, Mattering Press.

Within the Open Book Futures project, one of my main areas of work is leading and building up the Open Book Collective (OBC). It is an independent non-profit which raises funds for book publishers and infrastructure providers deeply committed to Open Access. A key aim is the enable the OBC to be wholly self-sustaining by the end of the Open Book Futures project.

In addition, I am currently working with colleagues to explore how issues of ethics and security become entangled when organisations encounter or prepare to encounter Autonomous Systems. This work is part of the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems: Security Node, an EPSRC funded project bringing together social scientists and computer scientists. It connects to earlier work on informational mobilities and big data credit scoring.

I have a longstanding interest in the interactions between defaulting debtor and debt collector, which was the subject of my first book Lived Economies of Default, published by Routledge in 2015. There and in other related publications, I sought to simultaneously explore the intimate dimensions of financialised life and their encounter with organisational expertise.

In doing so, I have developed an economic sociology informed by approaches from science and technology studies, speculative philosophy and non-representational theory. I am keen to build up science and technology studies as a field within Lancaster University, which I work on in my role as Director of the Centre for Science Studies, as well as a member of the Centre for Technological Futures. 

I have also co-edited two books: Practising Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collaborations, published by Mattering Press in 2016, and Markets and the Arts of Attachment, published by Routledge in 2017.