Aesthetics

The notion of aesthetics was famously defined by Kant as the individual judgment of ‘beauty’ defining culturally specific systems. Bourdieu’s work on ‘taste’ was one critical rendering of Kant’s aesthetics as a particular sensibility and valuation of beauty, trained and cultivated as ‘cultural capital’ in elite classes. For Bourdieu, taste is an aesthetic disposition marking […]

Air Pollution

Air pollution is often considered a modern phenomenon. But scientific analysis of skulls from ancient excavation sites reveals that in-door air pollution was a big problem for early man due to in-door fires and poor air conditioning in caves and early settlements. Even though life on earth is inseparable from air, historically air pollution has […]

Blockchain

Blockchain is a distributed database; a time-stamped record of transactions, publicized, maintained, and validated by a wide network of participating nodes. Blockchain is an ideological project; striving to create censorship resistance through decentralisation. These decentralised participants group batches of transactions into ‘blocks’, each containing the timestamp of the previous block to form long chronological chains. […]

Border

The cogito ergo sum of a border would arguably be “I divide therefore I am”. Every other claim about what a border does can be disputed, found to be partial, inaccurate or out-dated, but there is no border that does not divide one thing from something else. Ever since borders first became a particular technology […]

Bureaucracy

Max Weber inaugurated a sustained interest in the study of bureaucracy when, in 1921, Economy and Society was posthumously published. Weber was interested in bureaucracies not only because they are one of many models of organization that have emerged throughout history, but because in modern, capitalist societies, they are the dominant form of governance and, […]

Carbon

In his essay collection, The Periodic Table, Primo Levi narrates 100 plus years in the story of a single carbon atom. Starting its journey in limestone rock, this atom moves into organic human and non-human forms of life, and then into atmospheric gas traversing the globe, ending up as part of the structure that shapes […]

Community

In community studies, the concept of community has traditionally been used to refer to a physical place harboring a group of individuals who share feelings of belonging and solidarity. Members of the community share norms and values and meaningful relations; they trust and are familiar with one another; and, importantly, they share a place (Bradshaw […]

Data Centres

It is not uncommon to imagine our data as residing in the cloud. Although this metaphor provides a seductive grasp on the complexity of a distributed internet, it obscures as much as it reveals. How data is organized and where it is located is rendered in graspable, naturalized terms, as if our digitalised traces roam […]

Digital Responsibility

We define digital responsibility as ‘something more’ than the current attempts at protecting personal data. In 2018, alongside the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulating (GDPR) the liberal-right wing government of Denmark convened a national “Data Ethics Council”, seeing the culmination of years of work of advocates for the term “Data Ethics” (Hasselbach […]

Disruption

I want you to suspend your disbelief for a few moments and pretend that tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hadn’t co-opted the word disruption for their eye-roll inducing, money-making endeavours. What might we think about when we think of disruption if the likes of Uber, Amazon and Google simply didn’t exist? For us as both […]

Evidence

The Cambridge Dictionary defines evidence as “one or more reasons for believing that something is or is not true” (Cambridge dictionary, 2020, evidence entry). This definition reveals some of the core characteristics of how we understand evidence today, namely as something connected to a distinction between “true” and “not true”. But the vagueness of “reasons […]

ICT Development

Creating impact in agriculture? A digital application from the Global South One significant problem of countries in the Global South is a scarcity of resources to cover basic needs and services. The common challenges are; universal access to healthcare, lack of scientific knowledge for better agricultural yields, shortage of school teachers, migration problems, climate vulnerabilities, […]

Lab

The Laboratory, Originally considered a confined space for testing hypotheses, ‘making evidence’ For the lonely scientist to “remove” or distance himself from the experiment Repeating experiments through trials of strength[i] to become ‘matters of fact’[ii]   Puncturing the sterile lab environment    Experimentation evolves with methodological mutations   To understand sociomaterial worlds   Interventions and […]

Maintenance

Maintenance is the art and craft of keeping the material world going. We don’t even need to conjure the concept of “entropy” to see that the world we inhabit together would fall into complete disarray without sustained maintenance. It is helpful to contrast maintenance with repair. Repair, and the breakdowns it is a reaction to, […]

Monster

According to internet legend, a cursed JPEG-file called ‘smile.jpg’ circulates online. If you find it – if someone sends it to you as an email-attachment or as a link, perhaps telling you “I’ve seen it, it’s not so bad, just spreading the word” – you will see a dog-like creature with a much too human […]

Movement

The ‘new mobilities’ paradigm outlined by Sheller and Urry (2006) brought movement to the epicenter of the social sciences. The ‘mobility turn’ was marked by research revolving around the interdependent movements of people, information, images and objects. In this regard, to define movement in a network society, is to investigate the circulation of people, information […]

Network

The concept of network is a widespread term in contemporary social theory as well as other fields. It is commonly invoked in public imaginaries of the contemporary ‘digital age’. As such it is used, sometimes interchangeably, in both colloquial and analytic ways. Dictionaries define the present day use of the term as referring to complex […]

Numbers

Why should we care about numbers? Economic policy is led by gross domestic product (GDP), climate science calls for limiting global warming to 1.5°C, epidemiology uses the basic reproduction number R0 to indicate an infection’s expected impact (e.g. in a pandemic). The interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed an analytics of […]

Privacy Paradox

The privacy paradox is typically defined as the inconsistency between attitudes towards privacy and data disclosure behaviors. Although people often express concerns about their privacy, the same individuals are willing to reveal personal data for small rewards. This “attitude-behavior gap,” as some have described it, continues to confound technologists, politicians and researchers alike. If people […]

Protest

What does protest mean and how has it changed with the advent of technology? And what happens to technology when it is used as means of protest? Protest movements have a long tradition of appropriating technologies and reinventing their use in ways not intended by their designers. Andrew Feenberg (2002) argues that artifacts also provide […]

Space

Whether we are indeed in the epoch of space, as Foucault (1984) contends, is secondary to the fact that space has become a ‘key word’ (Harvey 2006). It has also become a substantive research topic across multiple social science disciplines (see de Vaujany and Mitev 2013), especially since the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social theory […]

Speculation

narrating, thinking, fabulating, doing, weaving, crafting, telling, creating, situating Crooked worlds require crooked methods. As a method and technique, speculation is concerned with accepting that explanation is not enough on its own, and that proof and evidence are not always sufficient when working on complex matters. Contemporary worldly troubles urge an engaged practice of articulating […]

State

Some definitions of state, stated in no particular order: State is a material property, as in states of matter, and it is a polity, as evoked by matters of state. In both denoting the configuration of elements understood to be similar; atoms distal and proximal for natural sciences, subjects higher or lower in political hierarchies. […]

Trust

How can we trust new technologies? With increasing attention towards artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, the question arises as to whether these new tools for decision-making can be trusted. Machine learning algorithms are often presented as systems that automatically learn based on data. As these algorithms ‘learn on their own’ it has proven difficult, […]

Emerging Technologies: The Case of Edge Computing

The Reimagining Digital Infrastructures project (James Maguire, Assistant Professor in TiP and Cristina Canureci) has published a report on Edge Computing. Edge infrastructures–– as a newly emerging computing paradigm––are one form of industry response to the need to diversify our digital infrastructures. While not replacing centralized digital processes, edge is one way, the report argues, […]

Your Holiday Listen – New Podcast Episodes

Just in time for a good listen during the holidays, researchers of the Data as Relation Research project and the Center for Digital Welfare have recently published some new podcast episodes.  Listen to the special series of the Data as Relation podcasts telling the story of digitalization and big data in little Denmark through conversation […]

Digital mazes reinforcing inequality – Professor Brit Ross Winthereik in Ingenøren

In a recent article in Ingenøren, Brit Ross Winthereik, Professor in TiP, discusses issues of ‘digital housekeeping’ in the Danish digitalized welfare state. In the article, Winterheik is raising questions of structural reinforcements of inequalities through placing the responsibility of access to digital services on the citizens. As a high degree self-sufficiency and technical knowledge […]

Call for Papers Special Issue – Digital Mistrust

TiP Researchers Assistant Professor Lise Røjskjær Pedersen and Assistant Professor James Maguire are editing together with Kristoffer Albris, Assistant Professor at Copenhagen University, a special issue on ‘Digital mistrust: Rethinking trust in digitalizing societies’. While there is little agreement within academia, and beyond, as to the precise meaning of the term trust, there is broad […]

TiP Researchers transforming lectures into live radio shows

In the light of the current pandemic situation and the challenges this poses for teaching activities, assistant professor Jessamy Perriam and associate professor Baki Cakici, both TiP members and lecturers of the course ‘Navigating Complexity’, have transformed inperson lectures into live radio shows. This format and novel teaching method provides new opportunities to convey complex […]

TiP @ EASST/4S 2020

This year, TiP members contribute in various ways and topics the virtual EASST/4S conference.   Kick off your conference days with an excursion to the UK through Jessamy Perriams’s presentation on ‘De-Inscribing and Re-Insribing Legacy Technologies in the UK Public Sector’, before following Rachel Douglas Jones and James Maguire’s panel ‘Political Data of the Digital […]

New TiP Essay Collection published: Museum Implosions

Museum Implosions is a collection of 17 essays by members of the Technologies in Practice group at the IT University of Copenhagen. The implosion, a method for generating critical enquiry, draws on Dumit’s instruction to continue in the pedagogical spirit of Donna Haraway’s scholarship. Based on a research trip to the Danish Technical Museum, the […]

TiP contributes to Digital STS Field Guide

TiP members Associate Professor Marisa Cohn, Professor Brit Ross Winthereik and Assistant Professor James Maguire contributed to the recently published field guide “Digital STS. A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies” edited by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes. The collection, published in 2019, entails twenty-five essays, which are offering new approaches to digital scholarship, […]

New Research Project: Welfare after Digitalization

Researchers in TiP, Associate Professor Vasilis Galis and Professor Brit Ross Winthereik, are leading the new research project Welfare after Digitalization.  The aim of Welfare after Digitalization is to investigate how institutional values, digital affordances, and organizational politics are imagined and embedded in digital welfare services, as well as experienced and practiced by citizens, public […]

Tea in TiP: Interview with Visiting Researcher Nikolaus Pöchhacker

Welcome to our informal interview series with visitors to the research group. It is called Tea in TiP because interviewees are invited to share a cup of tea (though we shared some coffee on this  occasion) and talk about what they hope to work on while visiting ITU and TiP. Nikolaus Pöchhacker is visiting from […]

“Datapolitics is more than GDPR and privacy, we also need to talk about climate” – new research initiative ‘The Digital Anthropocene’

With a moderate climate, a stable electricity grid and a central location in Europe, Denmark’s growing data center industry offers ideal conditions that big tech companies have long been looking for. As tech giants, like Google, Facebook and Apple, place their servers in Denmark in order to store data from European users, questions regarding climate […]

Digital Trust in Denmark – A workshop on trust and mistrust towards public institutions in the world’s ‘most digitized country’

On December 11th, TiP’s research group Data as Relation and SODAS – Center for Social Data Science at Copenhagen University held a workshop on ‘Digital trust in Denmark’. This workshop aimed to debate the hypothesis that Denmark’s increasing digitalization is facilitated by the citizen’s trust in society and the welfare state. To discuss this question, […]

Reimagining Digital Infrastructures – workshop series by James Maguire and InfinIT

On 4th December 2019, James Maguire and InfinIT held the first workshop of the workshop series Reimagining Digital Infrastructures here at ITU. The series of workshops, funded by InfinIT (Innovationsnetværk for IT), aims to consider new ways of creating more ethically inflected digital futures. The first workshop was an exploration of ways in which digital […]