CHELSEA HAITH
Research & Insights
Word mechanic
Recovering academic
Travelling Sydney to London in 2025
Research
With 10 years research experience, I've worked in commercial research, augmenting complex social research experience from my doctoral work at Oxford with commercial qualitative research experience in brand strategy, product development, U&A, concept testing and UXR. I'm skilled at all traditional qual methodologies (IDIs, focus groups, ethnography, community boards) as well as digital methods for UX and creative asset testing across categories including Finance, Tech, Telcos, Higher Ed, FMCG, Tourism, Healthcare, NGOs, and Online Retail.
Storytelling
I've research background in speculative urban inequalities, sociology, and narrative traction, with real world application in my Narrative Futures podcast.
I've also built narratives from AI generated texts for the Sound of Contagion, working across media and technology to explore the possibilities of tech tools to enable and advance creative practice.
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I trained as a journalist and am skilled at crafting stories for commercial projects.
Collaboration
Developing and running the Futures Thinking research network in the fields of futurity and the Humanities, I've written successful grant applications and built networks across diverse disciplines with collaborative teams.
My most recent project was an interdisciplinary collab at the intersection of AI, music composition and narratology with colleagues in London and Berlin.
I'm interested in multi-media projects as well as research-performance work.
Editing
I'm an expert editor and proofreader, with experience in fiction, poetry and academic writing. I've been the go-to editor for poet Koleka Putuma's since 2017, managed a reviews team for Africa in Words and was the Online Editor at The Oppidan Press. I supervised Oxford undergraduate and Masters students' dissertations, worked as an editor on a small literary journal, and was a 'dog's body' at an experimental poetry publisher for a year - I'm experienced in concept development, editing, and proofreading across genres and forms.
I've been described as a literary knife. Send me words to find out why.