Dr Paula Crutchlow is a cultural geographer and practicing artist with an extensive background as a maker and educator in contemporary performance. As a co-founder of artist collective Blind Ditch (www.blindditch.org) Paula has been using digital media to engage publics as thinking citizens and active spectators in performances and cultural events across the South West of England for nearly 20 years. She has a long-term interest in interdisciplinarity as publicly accessible spaces for social thinking and activism; a means to collaborate ethically with publics on matters of concern.

Paula began to study cultural geography through the Museum of Contemporary Commodities (http://www.moccguide.net/) a collaborative project with Professor Ian Cook (https://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Ian_Cook) which also became her PhD study. This project, now the basis for an ESRC Post Doctoral Fellowship in Geography at the University of Exeter, combined social art practice with geographic methods to investigate connections between data, commodities, place and values in late capitalism.