Steven Watson is a person of many parts and many pasts. He is now an associate professor of transdisciplinary studies in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, but this perhaps disguises a variety of pasts and seemingly unrelated experiences. These will follow, but first, a little about his current work and interests. Steve, as his more informal moniker, works with the idea of autopoiesis, which was developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann from the original idea developed by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis characterizes any entity, material, living, technological, cognitive, or discursive, as self-referentially operationally closed but thermodynamically and informationally open. This is commonly presented as a relationship between systems and environments. This is also informed by George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form, which offers an analysis of form through distinction.

The consequence of this is a non-essentialist account of the universe, materiality, consciousness, technology, and society, where systems are paradoxically distinct but not exclusive from each other. The stability of material, living, technological, cognitive, and social systems comes about through their own recursive distinction-making and their internal autopoietic differentiation that forms the basis of a system’s internal operation. This follows an improbable evolution of autopoietic distinction, variation, and stabilization. Thus, the universe can be observed autopoietically as having no essential substance or property but as an ecology of autopoietic systems that are mutually influencing each other in dynamic stability.

Steve uses these ideas to offer a holistic and ecological examination of technology, society, and education. His research in the last 14 years has considered teacher learning, educational practices, the role of social media, populism, and culture wars on education policymaking, and the role of generative AI in education and society. But he places no limit on these phenomena. His overarching project can be best expressed with a quote from Peter Cook: “I am very interested in the universe; I am specializing in the universe and all that surrounds it.”

Steve left school at 15. After a period working in the family retail furniture business in North Nottinghamshire, England, and with little by way of formal school-level qualification, he began study for a National Furnishing Diploma and in interior design at the College for the Distributive Trades in Leicester Square, London. He then joined the department store, Liberty, in Regents Street, London, as a salesperson in the furnishing fabric department.

He was soon lured by the sea through a passion for sailing and adventure. He worked at Fox’s Marina in Ipswich in yacht brokerage and yacht delivery around Europe. As he studied for his yachtmaster’s certificate, he began to think it was time to return to education with a view to becoming a qualified naval architect and then a professional yacht designer. He returned to North Nottinghamshire and studied A-levels in mathematics, physics, and chemistry at North Nottinghamshire College for Further Education in Worksop. His chemistry teacher suggested dropping in an application to the University of Cambridge, from which an offer to study engineering and subsequent acceptance were made.

At age 25, he began reading general engineering at Cambridge, specializing in chemical engineering in his final year. This left the ambition for yacht design aside, but chemical engineering introduced him to what became a continued interest in systems and control and the human-machine interface. He started but did not complete a master's in the latter, lacking the theoretical tools to consider such a problem in the philosophical and sociological manner that he desired.

At the end of his studies, the chemical and process industries had little interest in Steven, and he had little interest in them. After a while drifting around Cambridge, France, and Italy and investing in painting, reading philosophy, and the social sciences, he became a cabling contractor in London. Pulling cable, crawling around under traders’ desks, and splicing computer network cable in chilled, artificially lit communications rooms turned out to be a highly formative informal ethnographic study of humans, organizations, social systems, and technology.

Just as his career in this was developing and he was becoming established as a network design engineer and sales engineer, he packed up from London and moved to the Lake District in Cumbria, England, to adopt a more bohemian lifestyle as an artist, painter, and philosopher. From there, he moved to Scourie in the northwest highlands of Scotland to become a shepherd, artist, and philosopher, looking after a small flock of predominantly North Country Cheviot sheep for a disabled crofter. From this, he gained expertise in lambing, sheering, and general flock management, assisted by a stray dog he had brought along from London and a retired blind and deaf sheepdog.

This bohemian itineracy ended abruptly, and he returned to North Nottinghamshire in 1999 to train to be a secondary school mathematics teacher at the University of Sheffield. He worked as a mathematics teacher in Grimsby and Cleethorpes for 9 years, where he gained a Masters in Education through part-time study with the Open University. A serendipitous meeting with his future PhD supervisor at a mathematics education research conference in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2008 resulted in him joining the University of Nottingham to do a Masters in Education Research Methods and a PhD in Mathematics Education looking at secondary mathematics teachers’ professional development.

In 2013, Steve was back in Cambridge with a tenured position as a university lecturer in mathematics education and working in initial teacher education in the Faculty of Education. A mentor at the time said to him, “What you need to do is find something or some area of mathematics education and become a recognized global expert in that field.” It is uncertain, within this apocryphal tale, whether Steve said or thought in response, “You know what? I won’t be able to do that,” recognizing his own restless and eclectic philosophical and creative proclivities.

This ends where this text began. Steve increasingly moved toward critical theory, social theory, sociology, and scholar activism in Cambridge. He taught undergraduate and postgraduate social theory in the sociology of education, where he developed his interest in social systems theory and autopoiesis. The pandemic lockdown facilitated further philosophical inquiry into autopoiesis and a transformation to transdisciplinary studies. He has seemingly returned to address the unfinished problem that he found during his MA in chemical engineering in 1994, understanding the human-machine interface. But now, from an autopoietic perspective and in the context of generative AI,.

He is now very pleased to be writing about science, technology, culture, and society on a range of issues informed by his experiences and philosophical interests in a way that is accessible to a wider audience.