Dr. Annette Markham is Professor of Media Literacies and Public Engagement at Utrecht University focused on frameworks and tools for generating more ethical digital futures through publicly engaged critical pedagogy. Markham is a long-time digital ethnographer, studying the lived experience of digitalization and datafication, particularly focused on young adults. As a methodologist trained in humanities, social science, and feminist traditions, she is well known for developing frameworks for mindful, ethical, and creative approaches to studying cultural phenomena in digitally-saturated, datafied, and AI-embedded social contexts. Markham also specializes in speculative design thinking techniques to foster self-guided social science among citizens. As founder and PI of the Futures+ Literacies + Methods Lab (FLL), Markham seeks to use participatory engagement practices and community engaged learning to build capacity around tools for ethical and critical AI literacies, especially to explore the power, potential, and ethical dilemmas of AI in everyday internet and digital media usage.

Since 2012, Annette has been training young adults to study their own lived experiences of digitalization and datafication, through guided autoethnography. In 2025, she expanded this with an international team of researchers as part of the FLL. Young adults around the world are conducting DIY autoethnographies of their lived experience with Generative AI and are donating their field diaries. With these studies, Markham seeks to build critical data and AI literacies among young people, as well as amplify their voices and perspectives for policy makers and communities of practice.

This work continues Markham's longstanding practice of building various sandboxes for scholars of differing experience to do research that matters to them. She previously launched the International Future Making Research Consortium, co-developed and co-directed the Digital Living Research Commons at Aarhus University, directed the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, and founded and directs the Skagen Institute, which has hosted fellows since 2014 for an annual conference onTransgressive Methods. 

Info on UU's Pure Platform is not complete. Full CV, publication links, informal blogposts, and list of upcoming speaking engagements  are available at https://annettemarkham.com. Orcid and Google Scholar also list most publications.