Seeing through infrastructure:Ethnographies of HealthIT, Development Aid, Energy and Big Tech

Inaugural professorial lecture From the introduction: It is a pleasure and a great privilege to be standing here in front of you today to celebrate the newly established chair in Science and Technology Studies and ethnography at the IT University of Copenhagen. I am excited that so many have come to spend the afternoon here. Science and Technology Studies or STS is a relatively new academic field. It is the study of how social, political and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation and vice versa, that is how scientific and technological developments affect societal values and politics in turn. Questions of interest to this field have for example been: What makes scientific facts credible? What makes us trust in science? How to create civic engagement around questions of science and technology? How is the general public involved in decisions around for example the manipulation of genes or the location of nuclear waste storage

Seeing through infrastructure: Ethnographies of HealthIT, Development Aid, Energy and Big Tech

Inaugural professorial lecture From the introduction: It is a pleasure and a great privilege to be standing here in front of you today to celebrate the newly established chair in Science and Technology Studies and ethnography at the IT University of Copenhagen. I am excited that so many have come to spend the afternoon here. Science and Technology Studies or STS is a relatively new academic field. It is the study of how social, political and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation and vice versa, that is how scientific and technological developments affect societal values and politics in turn. Questions of interest to this field have for example been: What makes scientific facts credible? What makes us trust in science? How to create civic engagement around questions of science and technology? How is the general public involved in decisions around for example the manipulation of genes or the location of nuclear waste storage

Innovating Relations - or why smart grid is not too complex for the public

Revamping the electricity infrastructure to allow for an increased usage of renewable energy sources is a matter of concern in many parts of the world. In Europe, a major policy question is how to move energy demand to periods with surplus of renewable energy in the grid. In this paper we follow prominent Danish and German delegates working towards realizing the intelligent electricity infrastructure commonly known as ‘smart grid’ envisioned to be a significant actor in the management of renewable energy. Starting out with a view on smart grid that recognizes it as a partially existing object, we attend to its gradual emergence by focusing on two models and a metaphor evoked to represent smart grid development. As we contrast and compare these representational objects, smart grid emerges as a potential ‘thing’. Following Latour a ‘thing’ is a gathering of many actors agreeing and disagreeing about what the thing ‘is’ (its ontological status). In the paper we show how smart grid innovation both emerges – and fails to emerge – as an object of relevance to a broader public. Even though users play an important role in the imagination of experts, a gap remains between the experts and those who smart electricity infrastructures will come to affect. Concerned with this gap we argue that Science and Technology Studies must pay attention to how smart grid development gets constructed as a public problem in specific imaginative spaces of opportunity and closure

INFRASTRUKTURER OG DATAARBEJDE: Etnografiske studier af sundheds-IT, udviklingsbistand, vedvarende energi og datacentre

Science and Technology Studies, eller STS, er stadig et relativt nyt akademisk felt. Det er studiet af, hvordan sociale, politiske og kulturelle værdier påvirker videnskabelig forskning og teknologisk innovation og omvendt, altså hvordan den videnskabelige og teknologiske udvikling påvirker samfundsmæssige forhold

Infrakritik og proximering:Om at finde den rette afstand

In this paper, we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation and research. Taking our point of departure in a notion of critique as finding the right proximity introduced by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we discuss alternatives to critique as based on a position detached from the object of critique. Our analysis shows that critique is immanent to the practices we study and already to some extent conceptualized by the practitioners. To further problematize the already ongoing critical engagements in the organizations we study, we relate our ethnographic descriptions to work done on infra critique (Verran, Willerslev). In conclusion, the relation between the notion of critique as infra-critic and scholarly critical practices is commented on. We find proximation to be a useful concept as an infra critical description of ongoing experimentation with professional identities and organizational boundaries