about Clare
Welcome
The brutalist towers had been there long before I was born, puncturing the horizon like stranded vessels turned to stone.
I grew up on a small island in the English Channel, where remnants of the Atlantic Wall still line the coast. These concrete fortifications—brutal, geometric, sometimes half-eroded by sea and wind—were impossible to ignore. Built by forced labour under Nazi occupation, they were at once functional and strangely beautiful: monuments to power, fear, and obedience, softened only by time.
As a child, I was fascinated by them. Not simply by what they were, but by what they represented. How could entire populations be mobilised into brutality? How could ordinary people come to accept — even participate in — systems of domination and control? And how could such violence leave behind structures that slipped so easily into the background of everyday life?
That question has followed my work ever since.
It led me first to history, and culture — to the study of propaganda, ideology, and the ways power moves through images, narratives, and institutions. Those questions shaped my doctoral research. I learned to trace how belief is shaped, how authority is normalised, and how repression often operates not through force alone, but through repetition, symbolism, and silence.
Over time, my attention shifted from the past to the present. I became interested in how these same dynamics reappear in education, markets, technology and digital environments that organise attention and behaviour at scale. I hold a PhD and postgraduate degrees in psychology. My academic path moved from history and philosophy into psychological science, across Cambridge, St Andrews, the Courtauld and Edinburgh, while my professional life moved increasingly into the institutions and technologies I had begun to study.
Working inside organisations — including strategy consulting, and product development and management in technology — sharpened this question. I saw how incentives quietly train behaviour, how metrics displace judgement, and how responsibility is diffused across systems until no one appears accountable. The mechanisms were different from those I had studied historically, but the effects felt eerily familiar.
Psychology offered a way to bring these strands together.
I trained as a practitioner psychologist not to retreat into the individual, but to understand how distress is lived — embodied, relational, and often profoundly rational given the conditions people inhabit. Clinical work grounded my thinking in real lives, while PsychD research allowed me to examine emerging forms of influence, including the use of generative AI as a source of reassurance, guidance, and emotional support.
Today my work moves between research, writing, clinical practice and public life. I write and speak about technology, psychology and power; advise on AI ethics and psychological risk; and develop applied projects including NeuroClear, focused on psychological care for neurodivergent adults. Building things — ideas, products and organisations — has also taught me something scholarship alone cannot: systems rarely behave exactly as their designers expect.
Alongside this, I write fiction. Where my non-fiction follows systems, my novels stay close to lives: to longing and displacement, to love under pressure, to the ways history enters the body without asking permission. Fiction allows me to hold what analysis cannot — ambiguity, contradiction, the unsayable.
I have always learned by moving. When thinking stalls, I go to mountains or water: glaciers in Kyrgyzstan, volcanic valleys in New Zealand, the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, long alpine traverses, open sea. These journeys are not escape. They are recalibration. Scale returns. Attention sharpens. What matters clarifies.
The question that began on a windswept coastline remains the same:
how control takes hold, how it becomes normal, and how people learn to live inside systems that quietly organise what they see, feel, and believe...
Where psychology, reflection, and lived experience meet.
Getting to Know Clare
Early experiments in bravery, vulnerability, and pretending everything was fine.
Culture understood one dumpling at a time.
Management consulting (Bain & Co). Optimisation, in heels.
Training my eye at Christie’s — where culture, value, and judgement intersect.
Walking The Camino de Santiago. Press pause.
Finishing a PhD, discovering the quiet pleasure of teaching.
Writing my novel Borderless, and a brief Bollywood detour.
Product Management by day, NeuroClear by night, yoga to keep me honest.
Writing The Algorithmic Mind — and pretending the tea is doing most of the work.
Early experiments in bravery, vulnerability, and pretending everything was fine.
What feels personal is often designed
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