CHRISTOPHER O'NEILL
Email
chris.oneill@monash.edu
Dr Christopher O’Neill is an Affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) from Monash University.
Christopher O’Neill a Lecturer in Media in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. He draws upon critical media theory and science and technology studies (STS) to investigate the way the human body is measured and mediated through technology. He is especially concerned with the social and political implications of facial recognition technology (FRT), biometric sensing, and emerging forms of automation, and he has collaborated with colleagues across the humanities, social sciences, law, and public policy.
Christopher’s first monograph, Cultural Techniques of Biosensing: A History of the Body in Error, will be published with Stanford University Press in 2026. The book is a history of ‘biosensing’ technologies like heart-rate monitors and movement sensors. It tracks the way that biosensors in the medical clinic, the workplace, and the (smart) home have made errors in their measurement of the body, and how the way that these errors get ‘corrected’ has produced new ways of imagining and surveilling the body. Christopher’s second monograph, Facial Recognition in Everyday Life, will appear in early 2027, also with Stanford University Press. The book has been co-authored with a team of Australian researchers, including ADM+S colleagues Professor Mark Andrejevic and Professor Neil Selwyn. The book examines the growth of facial recognition technology, and the civic and political implications of the normalisation of biometric surveillance.
Industry and community engagement form a central component of his research practice. He is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project A Cultural History of Workplace Fatigue, which aims to promote better practices of fatigue management for the future of work. His research has informed public debate as a commentator on workplace surveillance in media outlets including Channel 10’s The Project, The Guardian, and The Conversation.
Christopher has established extensive international research collaborations and partnerships. He was awarded a 2025–2026 Fulbright Program Postdoctoral Scholar Award to undertake research at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (USA), where he studied the relation between automation, technological error, and human oversight. He has also held a Visiting Fellowship at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (UC Berkeley), and before joining Monash was a Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. He is also an executive member of the Australasian Science and Technology Studies (AusSTS) Network, and in 2025 convened the Network’s annual conference in collaboration with Melbourne’s National Communication Museum.
