Research
Our Group's research centers on three main areas: Ethics in technological societies; Science, technology and democracy; and Development of technical cultures.
Ethics in technological societies
We study ethics-in-society, that is the meanings and practices of ethics in the context of global digital societies where data, computing, and Artificial Intelligence are ubiquitous tools for sense- and decision-making.
Our team uses and contributes to the development of theoretical ethical traditions that include narrative and relational ethics, moral anthropology, cosmopolitan ethics and ethics in a cross-cultural comparative perspective, and feminist and care ethics. In working with these frameworks, we seek to reconcile them with perspectives from STS on science, technology, and knowledge in contemporary societies.
We also translate these theories and our empirical investigations into ethics-in-society into technology ethics education and technical practice, collaborating with and supporting students and colleagues from the sciences and engineering in making sense of ethical issues in the context of their study and work and developing practices for responsible research and innovation.
Science, technology and democracy
In addition to specific work on ethics, the Group also works on broader questions at the intersection of science, technology and democracy. This includes examining critical concepts and institutions of collective life, such as citizenship, expertise, public reason, power, and the law, and how these are articulated in conjunction with transformations in digitization and climate change. We are interested in how contemporary democratic institutions and policies are developed or reconfigured to create worlds deemed worthy of living in, including by governing emerging technologies.
One specific set of interests in this broader area of science, technology and democracy concerns technologies of quantification and classification and their interplay with changing concepts and practices of person, citizen, and state.
Another branch of research looks towards how people deploy certain forms of knowledge and technologies to envision desirable futures and to bring them into being. Here we ask questions about whose knowledge, whose technologies, and whose visions get realized and what alternatives exist and how these alternatives are expressed.
Development of technical cultures
A third area of research concerns the development and interrelations of technical cultures around the world. We investigate the circulation of cultures and imaginaries of technological innovation, the histories of computing education and the development of public computing, and present day styles and ethos of developing data and computing literacies for publics.
This area of research also connects to our work on STS and pedagogy, namely reflecting on the role of and approaches to the practice of constructivist critical thinking in today's technical university.