Welcome to another instalment of our Spotlight On series, where we showcase the world-leading work of our academics. Professor Mariann Hardey, in our Business School, examines how digital systems shape, constrain and often exclude people. Her work studies the friction between human complexity and algorithmic simplicity.
Mariann’s research poses challenging questions about who benefits from digital innovation and who pays the hidden costs.
Mariann argues that modern technology is often structured in ways that predominantly serve what is considered a ‘standard user’. In her view, the digital world seems to insist on flattening diverse human experience into inadequate data points.
For the ‘digital outsiders’ who do not fit these data points, such as women and neurodivergent people, technology simply does not adequately understand or serve them.
It is this digital inequality that drives Mariann’s work to explore and expose the hidden cost of the machine – for people, society and culture.
Mariann’s unease with dominant, optimistic, narratives about technology drove her early career. She recognised that for many, technology is alienating rather than empowering.
She started out studying social media and online identity, before these topics gained widespread academic attention.
Over time this focus has shifted from understanding bias in the user interface – the point of interaction and communication between humans and machines – to locating inequality at their source, embedded within digital code itself.
Today, Mariann’s work includes leading initiatives in High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence.
Mariann sees her greatest achievement as generating a movement that refuses the notion of ‘resilience’ in the face of technological challenges.
Often ‘digital outsiders’ are told that their issues with technology are due to a lack of resilience. Mariann disagrees. She argues that society must stop asking the marginalised to be ‘resilient’ in the face of hostile technology. Resilience in this instance, Mariann highlights, is expecting people to endure a broken system.
Instead, she advocates for resistance – through dismantling the hostile aspects of technology and rewriting the rules to improve systems for digital outsiders.
Mariann enables this through building and supporting spaces that challenge systemic exclusion in computing, such as our Women in High-Performance Computing cluster.
Mariann’s work has helped shift academic debate around digital technology. For her, focusing on getting more people online is not enough if the online space they are entering is fundamentally driven by inequality.
Her research treats algorithms not as neutral tools but as unreliable narrators that dictate the terms of our social existence. By applying a forensic literary analysis to code and corporate rhetoric, Mariann shows the subtle exclusions that marginalise groups online.
In doing so she has highlighted how many "free" tools often carry significant social and cultural costs.
Mariann has shown how misogyny in women’s football is fuelled by platforms built to prioritise engagement over safety. Exposing this digital hostility as intentional –not accidental – links directly to Mariann’s calls for resistance rather than acceptance.
Her work on medical pulse oximeters, shows how these were designed around a “standard” skin tone, failing many users. This insight reveals how tech that ignores human diversity creates dangerous, unequal outcomes and proves that flattened data can cost lives.
Mariann joined Durham in 2010, drawn by the combination of historic scholarship and future-facing research.
The intersection of humanities, social science and computing at Durham suits her interdisciplinary approach, supporting her interest in how past structures shape future technologies.
Mariann is focused on what she terms the ‘impossible stand’ to address the social and environmental consequences of large-scale digital systems.
She wants to develop a path of critical refusal and hopes to define new ethics of AI that interrogate whether certain systems should exist at all.
This interrogation of digital power is particularly relevant in Mariann’s role as one of the Co-Directors of the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life (LCAL), where her work on the ‘impossible stand’ moves from theory to practice.
As co-lead on the ‘Being Human’ theme, she examines what it means to be human in an age where our identities are increasingly curated, measured, and mediated by algorithms.
This work is, in part, driven by a personal mission, as a mother, to ensure that the next generation is not simply reduced to data points.
Mariann’s work is at the forefront of a global movement that refuses to let algorithmic logic define the human experience.
In doing so, she positions Durham as a leader in global debates about technology’s role in society, challenging people to question technological necessity and inevitability.
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