Our research

Technologies in Practice is one of Scandinavia’s leading research groups at the intersection of IT and society. Based at the IT University of Copenhagen, we conduct qualitative studies of technologically mediated practices in organisations and everyday life.
 
The vast majority of societal challenges demand critical engagement with contemporary technologies. Our interdisciplinary environment provides students and researchers with the resources necessary for analysing entanglements of the social and technical with and through IT, foregrounding the mutual shaping of cultures, organisations, people and technologies in practices of design and use.
 
How we work
Drawing on our diverse intellectual backgrounds, colleagues in TiP conduct field based research that translates into engagements with the academic and wider world. Our approach is empirical, understood in the broadest sense. Whether we draw on the disciplinary traditions of STS, anthropology, HCI or CSCW, the Technologies in Practice research group provides a home for researchers dedicated to better understanding the role of IT changes in contemporary society.
 
Our research strengths include
  • critical analyses of the use of data and technologies in the digital welfare state
  • the social life of algorithms
  • contemporary energy and carbon data landscapes
  • the use of digital technologies by migrants
  • digital privacy and trust
  • values and ethics in connected technologies
  • IT in education.
 
You can read more about our current projects here, and the breadth of themes TiP researchers focus on in our Lexicon.

Current projects

We currently host to multiple external grants, and our work has been supported by national and international funders, such as the Danish , Nordforsk, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, the Innovation Foundation, Carlsberg Foundation, Velux Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation.

Understanding Nordic Digital Order (UNDO) - Digitalisation of Policing in the Nordics, Activism, and Surveillance Oversight

UNDO will employ a combination of research and artistic inquiry to critically investigate and relay the role and transformation of the digitalization of the police in three Nordic countries, and to mobilize for the protection of civil rights in the age of Big Data. We will conduct academic research that will examine how data driven technologies affect not only crime solving/prevention but also social inequality and civil rights.
DecouplingIT

The DecouplingIT Project thus approaches decoupling as a matter of how sociocultural change is generated in the spaces between IT, climate change and capitalism. We study these spaces through ethnographic explorations of how IT professionals and enterprises articulate climate change as a problem in demand of IT-generated change, and in particular how they practically deploy IT with the climate in mind.
SOS Project
Funded by Nordforsk, the SOS project is a research collaboration between the IT University of Copenhagen, the University of Adger, Gothenburg University and the Danish Agency for Digitisation, that investigates informal welfare work in the digitized state.
Digitalisation of the Everyday during Corona

Digitalisation of the Everyday during Corona collected an ethnographic archive during the first lockdown in Denmark, focussed on disturbances of everyday life and the role of digital technologies in re-orderings hereof. The archive was collected with the purpose of providing current and future researchers with access to material documenting experiences during a crucial time. The project was conducted in collaboration with AAU and researchers’ can apply fro access to the archive by writing to corona_digital@itu.dk.
STAY HOME

Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, STAY HOME is an interdisciplinary research project that documents experiences and initiatives and identify new insights and practices regarding the home during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Making Sense of Urban Air

The project investigates how new and more detailed data on air pollution from Google's Project Air View are made available in Copenhagen, and thus 'air quality’ is interpreted and defined by different actors. 
Democratic Innovations in a Green Transition

Democratic Innovations in a Green Transition is a collaboration with Copenhagen University looking into the impact of the Danish citizen assembly on climate change.
SOCCAR

The Social Life of Carbon project is a 4-year (2019-2023) research project aimed at gaining a novel understanding of the social and cultural challenges of living with ‘carbon’ in the form of emission data
Welfare after Digitalization

The WAD project examines the many and varied consequences of public sector digitisation in Denmark. 
Critical Understanding of Predictive Policing

CUPP explores how institutional and social values are embedded in data-driven police innovations in Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Norway, Sweden and the UK.
Moving Data Moving People

investigates the lived experiences around the Chinese Social Credit System
Rohingya mHealth

Increasing Access to Healthcare for the Rohingya Community in the Refugee Camps in Bangladesh
Syrian mHealth

Funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Syrian mHealth is a one-year project aiding healthcare workers and Syrian refugees in Jordan.

SSH in Sustainable Business

The SSH in Sustainable Business project explores the relationship between SSH (Social sciences & humanities) knowledge and sustainability efforts in large Danish corporations, through the application of quali-quantiative computational techniques on open reporting data. The project also seeks to build a research infrastructure to make this data more easily accessible for others.

Past projects
Data as Relation

Data as Relation explored how big data is generated, negotiated and used in governance.
VIRT-EU

VIRT-EU was Values and ethics In Responsible Techology in EUrope – a European project funded by the Horizon 2020 program.
Ecoknow

Ecoknow was a 16m DKK project from Innovation Fund Denmark which linked technology and practice of adaptive case management
DIGINAUTS

DIGINAUTS - Migrants' Digital Practices in and of the European Border Regime
TiP magazine

A glossy magazine about our work.

Alien Energy

A project about energy futures.