Steven Watson

graduate

• Phenomenological Sociology (269958) - Lecturer in charge

Steven Watson is Associate Professor in Transdisciplinary Studies at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Wolfson College. His research is organised around Autopoietic Ecology, a framework that rethinks persistence and change as recursive processes of meaning, matter, and technology. Rather than treating knowledge, society, or nature as fixed foundations, Autopoietic Ecology examines how systems continually regenerate themselves through interaction. This approach offers a way of observing education, democracy, and society in conditions of accelerating complexity, climate change, and generative AI.

Autopoietic Ecology is both an intellectual framework and a practical orientation. For critical theory, it opens a path beyond essentialism and reductionism: it does not ask what a system “is” in its essence, but how it continues to exist through its operations and relations. In this sense, it provides a language for understanding how institutions, publics, and technologies persist without requiring stable foundations or universal truths. It suggests that sustainability is less about restoring lost wholes and more about cultivating viable couplings between systems—whether educational, civic, ecological, or technological. It is ambitious in scope: a theory of persistence without foundations, coherence without essence, and relation without fusion.

To advance this work, Steven Watson co-founded EdgeLab, a Cambridge-based research ecology. EdgeLab is designed as an experimental space where theory, practice, and technology meet. It brings together researchers, practitioners, and students to develop and apply Autopoietic Ecology through conceptual innovation, prototype development, and collaborative projects. EdgeLab’s flagship initiative is the AE-Engine, a platform for mediating human–AI interaction that shifts the focus from accuracy and prediction to meaning, trust, and ecological integration.

Steven Watson is also co-founder of the Cambridge Global Knowledge Nexus (CGKN), a consultancy and knowledge-transfer venture that extends Autopoietic Ecology into practice. CGKN works with municipalities, NGOs, and enterprises to address societal challenges in education, governance, and civic resilience. Its ambition is to act as a bridge between academic research and applied innovation, showing how systems thinking can be mobilised to foster more sustainable, inclusive, and adaptive futures.

Alongside research and innovation, Steven is an active public speaker and commentator. He contributes regularly to international debates on AI, education, and democracy, with appearances on BBC Radio and invited lectures at leading universities and forums worldwide, including Tsinghua University, Davos, and the World Economic Forum. His forthcoming essay on trust and social systems, for a special issue of Kybernetes, extends Autopoietic Ecology to contemporary democratic challenges.

• Autopoietic Ecology: Rethinking Systems, Meaning, and Matter (2025, with Erik Brezovec). Read here
• Emergent Discourses in Generative AI in Education (2025). Read here
• The Integration of Generative AI in Education (2025). Read here
• Principal Investigator, Horizon Europe MSCA Staff Exchange project I-CIVIC: Innovating Civic Engagement (2025–2029).
• Convenor, Cambridge Generative AI in Education Conference 2025 (27–29 October, Hilton Cambridge).

Recent Publications

1. Watson, S. (2025). All operations are autopoietic: A processual ontology of self-sustaining action. Preprint.
2. Watson, S. (2025). Observing the environment of technology. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 42(2), 423–433.
3. Brezovec, E., Ježovita, J., & Watson, S. (2025). Theory and methodology in sociology—Guiding distinction. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 42(2), 477–487.
4. Watson, S., & Romic, J. (2025). ChatGPT and the entangled evolution of society, education, and technology: A systems theory perspective. European Educational Research Journal, 24(2), 205–224.
5. Watson, S., Brezovec, E., & Romic, J. (2025). The role of generative AI in academic and scientific authorship: An autopoietic perspective. AI & Society, 1–11.
6. Watson, S., & Shi, S. (2024). Generative AI integration in education: Challenges and approaches. In Artificial Intelligence in Education: The Intersection of Technology and Learning.
7. Bozkurt, A., Xiao, J., Farrow, R., Bai, J. Y. H., Nerantzi, C., Moore, S., Dron, J., … Watson, S. (2024). The manifesto for teaching and learning in a time of generative AI: A critical collective stance to better navigate the future. Open Praxis, 16(4), 487–513.
8. Marschall, G., Watson, S., Kimber, E., & Major, L. (2024). A transdisciplinary study of a novice mathematics teacher’s instructional decision-making. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1–26.
9. Watson, S. (2021). New Right 2.0: Teacher populism on social media in England. British Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 299–315.
10. Major, L., & Watson, S. (2018). Using video to support in-service teacher professional development: The state of the field, limitations and possibilities. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 27(1), 49–68.