CHRISTIAAN McCANN is an ongoing attempt to write a life in public: to trace personal histories, document social work and community projects, and test ideas about how we live together. What appears here draws on lived experience, field notes, independent research and conversations with people met in workplaces, streets, services and neighbourhoods. Rather than presenting finished theories, these pieces offer working hypotheses—observations from participation and proximity—inviting readers to compare them with their own experience, challenge their assumptions and, where possible, carry the discussion back into the communities we share.
Research classifications
Every piece gathered under Environment, Technology & Culture is marked with one of five classifications. They describe how the material was made, not how certain it is — a signal to the reader about the distance, or lack of it, between the writer and what is being described.
- Lived Experience. First-person accounts drawn directly from the writer's own encounters with a place, a technology or a community — unmediated, situated, and offered as testimony rather than conclusion.
- Participatory Research. Inquiry conducted alongside the people and environments being studied, where the writer takes part in the activity itself rather than observing from outside it.
- Action Research. Work undertaken through a practical project — an intervention, an initiative, a built thing — with reflection on what its outcomes reveal.
- Longitudinal Observation. Patterns traced over an extended period, returning to the same environments, technologies or relationships to note what changes and what persists.
- Independent Investigation. Self-directed inquiry — reading, interviews, document review — pursued outside any institution, with sources and reasoning made visible.
Browse the research
Find a piece by how it was made, or by the terrain it belongs to. The two are independent — a single article might be an Action Research piece filed under Education, Knowledge & Learning, or a Lived Experience account filed here, under Environment, Technology & Culture.
By classification
- Lived Experience
- Participatory Research
- Action Research
- Longitudinal Observation
- Independent Investigation
By collection
- Poverty, Work & Economic Survival
- Disability, Care & Community
- Family, Relationships & Social Bonds
- Education, Knowledge & Learning
- Institutions, Power & Society
- Environment, Technology & Culture — you are here
How articles are labelled
Every article in this collection carries its collection and one classification visibly, alongside its publication date, so a reader always knows where a piece sits before reading a word of it.
- Collection. The terrain the piece belongs to — here, Environment, Technology & Culture.
- Classification. One of the five methods above, chosen for how the piece was made.
- Publication date. When the piece was written, so observations can be placed in time.
Within the body of each article, three kinds of material are kept distinct rather than blended into a single authoritative voice: what the writer directly witnessed or experienced; the writer's own interpretation, working hypotheses and provisional conclusions drawn from that experience; and, where it is used, established evidence from existing research or scholarship. None stands in for the others, and the piece should make clear, as it moves, which one the reader is in.
Articles in this collection
Nothing has been filed here yet.
Environment, Technology & Culture is still an open field — the first pieces on how we build, inhabit and are shaped by our surroundings and our tools are being written. Check back, or follow along from the other collections in the meantime.