Professor Fatema Kawaf’s Inaugural Lecture

Overview

In this inaugural lecture, Professor Fatema Kawaf, of Nottingham Business School, traces her research journey as a visual thinker navigating an academic world long dominated by textual and verbal ways of knowing.

Beginning with the methodological frustrations that shaped her early PhD research into digital experiences, Professor Fatema Kawaf will reflect on how existing quantitative and qualitative methods struggled to capture the visual, dynamic, and sensory nature of digital life. This challenge led her to develop Screencast Videography (SCV), a visual methodology designed to study digital experience as it unfolds—revealing not just what people say they do, but what they see, sense, and enact on screen.

SCV has opened new avenues for understanding contemporary digital life, including the rapidly evolving human–AI interactions and relationships, such as how individuals collaborate with, defer to, and make sense of AI systems in their everyday life and work.

Alongside this, Professor Fatema Kawaf will highlight the contributions of her broader scholarship on visual methods, including visual diaries and arts-based approaches, which collectively advocate for a more sensory, embodied understanding of human experience. Together, these strands illustrate a central message: in an AI-powered world, visual methodologies are not simply tools of data collection but vital epistemic lenses. They enable us to recognise, represent, and rethink how humans encounter, interpret, and co-create meaning with increasingly intelligent machines. This lecture invites a shift from a narrow “word-of-machine” mindset to a more curious world of visual and multisensory insights.

Biography

Professor Fatema Kawaf is a Professor in Digital Marketing and the Director of the Marketing and Consumer Studies Research Group at Nottingham Trent University. She is an innovator in visual methods and the founder of Screencast Videography – a qualitative visual method for studying digital experiences and interactions. She is also the chair of the UK Academy of Marketing Visual Methods SIG. Her award-winning work sits at the intersection of digital marketing, consumer research, and information systems and has been published in top Marketing and IS journals.