School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Max is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Data and the ‘Healthcare Revolution’ (DARE) project.

His research focuses on the ways that technological innovation is processed and produced through policy making practices. Specifically, Max is interested in the ways that rhetorical and discursive formations within policy foreclose particular technological futures, whilst opening others. In short, what types of knowing are valorised through the invocation to a 'data driven' healthcare system, and what types of knowing are considered too unstructured or too unscientific to perform clinical knowledge production, and under what conditions are such determinations of value made?

Max's PhD thesis, A Sociology of Medical Records: Digitising Clinical Knowledge, pursued why digitisation of medical records had proved so difficult. Through ethnographic research conducted over two years across the NHS and the healthcare technology sector, Max showed how medical records performed different functions within healthcare — a tool of professional audit, of knowledge coordination, and of epidemiological research— and that the new settlements regarding how these functions would articulate in a new digital medical record proved to be more difficult to resolve than the engineering problems of transforming an analogue paper technology into sparks and wires and code.

Max has also worked, for over ten years, in the NHS in various roles including working night-shifts as a medical records clerk, translating medical information to data as a clinical data auditor, talking to clinicians about 'digitisation' as a business change manager, and also as a 'product owner' (manager) of an Electronic Patient Record system.