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STS-hub Circulations in Aachen

15th - 17th March 2023, RTWH Aachen
The CUPAK team travels collectively to the STS-hub conference at the RTWH Aachen to present their current research.

In his talk "Embracing Fluidity in Style and Theorising - Drawing Inspiration from Bruno Latour" Koushik Ravi Kumar will discuss styles of academic theorizing and appeals for more diversity in the accepted standards of academic writing in STS. As a part of the panel "STS and the arts", Fabian Pittroff will talk about "Artificial and artistic intelligence" addressing circulations between algorithmic and aesthetic practices with findings from an empirical study on artistic work dealing with artificial intelligence. Mace Ojala will discuss the generative nature of software testing with a paper titled "Testing to Circulate. Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing" together with Anja Klein, Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Rebecca Carlson, Sarah Thanner and Tamara Gupper of Code Ethnography Collective. Estrid Sørensen will participate in the session "What version of STS are we circulating", which discusses her and other books introducing to STS and how they shape the curriculum of STS and (unintendedly) discipline STS. Together with Cornelius Schubert (TU Dortmund) Estrid has also organised a network meeting for the STS community in NRW.



Welcome to Kerstin Parasidis

1st March 2023
The CUPAK team has got a new secretary. After many years in the tourist business, Kerstin Parasidis has done the leap into academia. She is eager to learn about this new world and we are sure we can learn from her competences. We look very much forward to working together!


Across the Layers: Scientific Knowledge Production, Planetary Resources, and Data Centres

20th February - 13th March 
In this online workshop series, we gathered key scholars of the three fields of Critical Data Studies, Media Studies and Science & Technology Studies for short, intense and frequent discussions on planetary resources, data centres and scientific knowledge production. Over three weeks, we will meet online every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 16 hrs CET starting 20th February, to share concerns, ideas, concepts, empirical findings, political statements, and good laughs. Everyone is invited to join.
More information on this online workshop series can be found here.



Sustainability and Critical Data Studies: Invitation to the presentation of students' research projects

Friday 27. January 2023, 10-12 hrs. Ruhr-University Bochum (IA|1/91).
In the seminar "Sustainability and Critical Data Studies" Master's students of Social Science and Applied Computer Science worked together on research projects concerning the sustainable transformation of the Ruhr-University's campus. They will present their research findings on Friday 27th January in IA 1/91. All are welcome to join the presentations and stay for discussion afterwards.

As a part of their research projects the students also created data stories, which can be found here.



The environmental footprint of social media hosting: Tinkering with Mastodon

December 2022
Economic structures and everyday practices that stabilize excessive consumption, extraction, and energy-intensive practices must be challenged and abolished. Using discard studies as an innovative lens, a small group of scholars have come together and talked about the entanglements involved in setting up a solar-driven Mastodon server. Stefan Laser, Leman Celik, Koushik Ravi Kumar and Estrid Sørensen from CUPAK have contributed to setting up such a server at the Collaboratory Research Centre 1567 "Virtual Lifeworlds", and published a short piece on this together with Anne Pasek, Mél Hogan, Mace Ojala, Jens Fehrenbacher and Maximilian Gregor Hepach:
https://www.easst.net/article/the-environmental-footprint-of-social-media-hosting-tinkering-with-mastodon/


Categorizations of World War II in Videogames

31. December 2022
WWII remains a popular adaptation for videogames seventy years after its end, yet, what kind of war is depicted through these games? With inspiration drawn from Ethnomethodology, Jan Schank and Estrid Sørensen have written an article that asks which cues WWII first person shooters, strategy games and flight simulation provide players with to categorize WWII. Eight different categorizations are identified. Even though preferred categorizations are found in each of the three genres analyzed, each game invites players to categorize WWII in several different ways. Moreover, it is shown that the sequentiality of these different categorizations is crucial for the way in which players are led to engage in virtual military engagements. They are offered varied moral orders and varied moral engagements:
https://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/6893


Invitation to the book launch: "Interspecies care? The Corona Pandemic and the Human-Animal Relationship"

Thursday 01. December, 16 hrs. Ruhr-University Bochum (GB8|137).
We cordially invite you to the book launch (in German): "Interspecies care?
The Corona Pandemic and the Human-Animal Relationship" [Artenübergreifende Fürsorge].
The monograph was published this year by transcript.

The book launch will take place on Thursday 01/12 at 16h in GB8|137, i.e. in the "Virtual Classroom".

The book is the result of a writing collective. Empirically we assess public discourses around the Tönnies scandal and the mink culling from the year 2020.



The Geo-Ressources of Data Centres: Mapping and Shaping of Entanglements

Tuesday 15. Nov 16-18 hrs. Deutsches Bergbaumuseum.
Characterized as "the cloud" or as "virtual" the internet is mainly seen and marketed as light and hovering somewhere we do not have to bother about and where no harm can be done. Recently, STS and media studies scholars have emphasised how heavy the internet is, both in terms of cables, servers, metal, water, and indeed CO2 emissions. When having realized this dramatic reality, it is time to think about how the internet could be conceptualized differently. In their lecture at the German Mining Museum Estrid Sørensen and Stefan Laser suggest a topological approach that inquires how geo-ressources and data centres are entangled. They study how data centre planners and operators map data centres and look out particularly for when and where they map geo-ressources and their relations to data centres. 
  


Expenditure on 'Strava' and with 'Powermeter': On technologically mediated self-evaluation in cycling and an energetic perspective in sociology"

21. October 2022
Stefan Laser, A02 staff member at the Collborative Research Centre Virtual Worlds, has published an open-access paper on "Expenditure on 'Strava' and with 'Powermeter': On technologically mediated self-evaluation in cycling and an energetic perspective in sociology". This is an autoethnographic study on the technological mediation of sport. The data centre, part of the current research project, emerges as a central force. The paper differentiates between modes of expenditure, elaborates the prominence of the value of energy efficiency, points out some practical shortcomings of this value and outlines the merits of an energy sociological perspective. This raises awareness of the prominence of non-efficient practices in digitalised sport.

Laser, Stefan. 2022. ‘Verausgabung auf „Strava“ und mit „Powermeter“: über technologisch vermittelte Selbstbewertung beim Radsport und eine energiesoziologische Perspektive’. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 47 (3): 319–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-022-00497-w.


Welcome To Koushik Ravi Kumar

October- December 2022
We warmly welcome Koushik, who is a Student at the STS-Programme at the TU-Munich. Over the coming months Koushik will do an internship at the chair, at the RUSTlab and in the CRC Virtual Lifeworlds. Koushik has a background in computer engineering but has left this field to engage in a more critical engagement with science and technology in society. One of Koushik's key tasks will be to make a controversy analysis of sustainability in data centres. We look forward to work with you. 


RUSTlab Lectures

Winter term 2022/23, Ruhr-University Bochum and via Zoom
The programme for the 8th episode in the RUSTlab Lecture series is now available. This term the lectures will be in hybrid format: both on-line and on-site. The guiding theme will be "Data at work" and Speakers include Alina Kontareva (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for the Internet and Society, Berlin), Martha Komter (Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam), Dr. Basil Wiesse (KU, Erlangen) and Jan Schmutzler (RUB, Bochum). Please find more information here. Everyone is most welcome!



Welcome to Leman Çelik, Stefan Laser, Fabian Pittroff, and Lynn Werner

October 2022
Our research team will be considerably strengthened. Due to our participation in the Collaborative Research Centre 1567 "Virtual Lifeworlds" we will be able to employ four new researchers. Leman Çelik joins us from Istanbul, where she has been part of the Turkish STS
community. At the RUB she will do ethnographic studies of scientific data practices. Stefan Laser will return to Bochum after 18 months in Siegen, where he studied energy practices. He will now turn to study data centres practices and their sustainability, which indeed has a lot to do with energy. Fabian Pittroff recently finalized his dissertation at the University of Kassel where he studied digital privacy and personalization as distributed phenomena. Lynn Werner will join the team as student assistant. She just started her Master studies on social science methods at the Ruhr-University after completing her bachelor thesis on the data practices around femicide. We welcome you all.


Data Centre Politics and the Politics of Data Centre Studies

7. October 10-16 hrs., Technische Universität Berlin
On the workshop "Technopolitics and the Politics of STS Research: Experiences from Germany and Turkey" organized by Aybike Alkan Estrid Sørensen will discuss the state of the art of STS data centre research and compare this to how the data centre industry approaches current challenges such as sustainability, contributions to society and the power of technical infrastructure. Based on this she will discuss what we can - and should - expect of STS in their study of data centres. In her opinion, a more intimate collaboration with the industry is needed.


Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers

4. October 2022
Jan Schmutzler and Estrid Sørensen will discuss their work on "Playing with fire. Re-identification hacks and organisational micro-politics" on episode 4 of Hacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast.

Data anonymisation has long been the central measure for social scientists to protect the privacy of the subjects from whom they collect data. Recent years computational methods have made it increasingly easy to combine data sets, which also makes it easier to re-identify individuals in anonymised datasets (Rocher et al, 2019). No standard procedure exists for testing if anonymised datasets are sufficiently protected against re-identification (Emam et al, 2015). In practice the method is re-identification attacks. Jan Schmutzler's and Estrid Sørensen's contribution will discuss the case of a re-identification hack and its repercussions. Based on this empirical analysis, they will address hacking and attacking more generally as methods for testing re-identification protection. 

The episode is a live recording from "Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers" panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. 



Welcome to visiting scholar Phoebe Sengers

July 2022 - June 2023
We warmly welcome Phoebe Sengers from the Information Science and Science & Technology departmens  at Cornell University. Phoebe will be a visiting scholar of the chair for Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge and of the RUSTlab for one year. She is an internationally acknolwedged scholar and has published widely in the field of cultural studies of technology. Her background in computer science makes Phoebe to one of the rare colleagues who is not only analysing technological systems, but also participating in their development. In Bochum she will be working on a project about IT-systems in rural areas, just as she will be writing a book based on her ethnography in a small, traditional fishing community of Change Islands, Newfoundland. We look very much forward to collaborating and sharing research experiences with Phoebe.


Vacancy: Doctoral researcher: Scientific data practices and data centres

Apply until 25. July 2022
We are looking for a doctoral researcher to conduct ethnographic research of scientific data practices and their ecological relevance. Data are central to knowledge production, but at the same time their storage and processing demand energy and raw materials. What role do energy use and the consumption of raw materials play in decisions about data processing methods and about how long data are stored? What trade-offs and negotiations unfold when scientific data infrastructures are established, and what are their consequences for scientific knowledge production, for collaboration in science, and for their ecological impact? What scientific, social, and ecological values and conventions play a role in these negotiations? Researching these questions, the project will contribute to understanding data infrastructures - whose immateriality is often suggested by terms such as "virtual," or "cloud" – as social, material, and ecological. In researching data infrastructures, the project will focus primarily on data centres, since these are, on the one hand, centrally important for science and, on the other hand, also have an increasing ecological impact.

We welcome applicants, who would like to work in a large collaborative research centre, and who is interested in participating in an inspiring and vibrant research community and to conduct research in a team. We particularly welcome applications with a university degree (Master) in the field of Science & Technology Studies, social or cultural anthropology, sociology, or a related social or cultural discipline

Please follow this link for the official announcement (in German – here is a translation). If you have inquiries of any kind, do not hesitate to contact the project leader on estrid.sorensen@rub.de. We look forward to your application by 25. July 2022.


Hacking, Data Visualisations and Health Technologies

7. July 2022 15:45-17:15, IFEMA North Convention Center, Madrid
We are well represented at this year's EASST conference (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology). Jan Schmutzler and Estrid Sørensen will present their work on "Playing with fire: re-identification hacks and organizational micro-politics" in a podcast format. Laura Kocksch and Estrid Sørensen will give a talk on "Setting up speculative visualiyation". And finally Julie Mewes, Sebastian Merkel and Estrid Sørensen have organzed a panel on "Co-design and knowing (in) digital health technologies with future users of all ages".



When URLs on social networks become invisible

8. June 2022
Together with Suay Melisa Özkula, Maria Lompe, Mariangela Vespa and Tianshi Zhao, Estrid Sørensen has published a new article entitled "When URLs on social networks become invisible: Bias and social media logics in a cross-platform hyperlink study" in First Monday.

Extant research has addressed various concerns of representativeness in digital social research including: bias in researchers’ selection of online spaces, foci on single-platform approaches, and limited or skewed samples due to API (application programming interface) restrictions. This paper adds to that work through an illustration of tool bias towards specific social media logics (e.g., Twitter logics) in a URL-based network across/within social media sites (illustrative case study = greenwashing). These “biases” are implicit in design, mirror extant societal trends, and are reinforced through platform biases. As such, researchers using such tools (above all, non-computational scholars) may have little awareness of these subliminal influences. The paper consequently argues that (a) tool choices often fall prey to issues in representation, reinforcing existing biases on a subliminal level; and, that (b) non-platform-specific creative situational approaches (like cross-platform URL explorations) provide a much-needed understanding of wider platform dynamics that highlight such biases.

You can find the publication here.



Vacancy: Post Doc in Participatory Design

As soon as possible
As part of the Collaborate Research Centre 1567 Virtual Life Worlds we are currently looking for a post doc for the so-called INF project “Information Infrastructure: Technology and Praxeologies”. The aim of the project is to build an virtual research infrastructure for the collaborative research centre. This will happen in collaboration with an IT technician and with the participation of the members of the research centre. The research will focus on data practices in the humanities with a particular focus on communication, storage, documentation, and data management.

We offer a 100% position for 4 years in a vibrant community of excellent and open-minded researchers along with extended support for career building. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact Estrid Sørensen: estrid.sorensen@rub.de

Please note that this is not the official announcement. You will find the official announcement with detail about how to apply here.


Gender and the History of Computing

7. June 2022
Ryoko Asai’s new article “Gender and the History of Computing” will be published as a part of the quarterly magazine Les Simones. The article focuses on remarkable female mathematicians and scientists who have greatly contributed to developing information technology but have not been paid sufficient attention in the history of computing. In the article, the author tries to approach the hidden side of the history of computing. Please check the details here (in Japanese).



Vacancy: PhD position on the co-configuration of data centres and scientific data practices

As soon as possible
How do data centre configurations contribute to shaping science? To what extend is scientific knowledge production adapted to the data storage and data processing capacities available? And to what extent does a university data centre adapt to scientists’ data practices? Data centres is a new object of study in Science & Technology Studies. The link between scientific knowledge production and data centres has not yet been investigated. This is the focus of this vacant PhD position. The successful candidate will work in the team “A02: Virtual Infrastructures: The Data Centre as Infrastructurer between Scientific Knowledge and Planetary Resources”. A Post Doc scholar in the team will study the interrelation between planetary resources and a university data centre while the PhD scholar will do ethnographic studies of the interrelation between the data centre and scientific data practices. In close collaboration also with the project leader, they together seek to answer the overall question of the interrelation between knowledge production and planetary resources, mediated by the university data centre. The project is part of the Collaborative Research Centre “Virtual Life Worlds” at the Ruhr-University, a vibrant group of almost 50 researchers, all eager to shed light on many different angles of the “Virtual” from a genuine humanities perspective. You will furthermore be part of the RUSTlab, which gathers Science & Technology Scholars in the Ruhr Area and beyond.

We are looking for a person with a Master Degree in Social or Cultural Anthropology, Sociology or similar. You must have experience with ethnographic research, preferably from a Science & Techology Studies perspective. But most important is that you are a team player and interested in contributing to a lively and creative research community. You need to be able to understand and speak a minimum of German, since the ethnography will be in a German speaking context.

We offer a 65% position for 4 years. The position will be filled as soon as possible. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact Estrid Sørensen: estrid.sorensen@rub.de

Please note that this is not the official announcement. You will find the official announcement with detail about how to apply here.


Vacancy: Post Doc position on the co-configuration of data centres and planetary resources

As soon as possible
The establishing and the operation of a university data centre require a lot of rare and raw materials and a lot of energy. This has been documented in several studies. Rarely, however do scholars have access to study the everyday practices of building and running a data centre. Attending to a university data centre, this is what this research seeks to do with ethnographic methods. Additionally, the successful candidate will conduct a value chain ethnography, following the material route from the data centre and back to the sources of the materials that feed into its construction and operation, inquiring where and how decisions about the use of planetary resources are negotiated. The successful candidate will work in the team “A02: Virtual Infrastructures: The Data Centre as Infrastructurer between Scientific Knowledge and Planetary Resources”. A doctoral scholar of the team will study the interrelation between a university data centre and scientific data practices, while the Post Doc will study the interrelation between data centre and planetary resources. In close collaboration also with the project leader, the team seeks to answer the overall question together of the interrelation between knowledge production and planetary resources, mediated by the university data centre. The project is part of the Collaborative Research Centre “Virtual Life Worlds” at the Ruhr-University, a vibrant group of almost 50 researchers, all eager to shed light on many different angles of the “Virtual” from a genuine humanities perspective. You will furthermore be part of the RUSTlab, which gathers Science & Technology Scholars in the Ruhr Area and beyond.

We are looking for a person with a Doctoral Degree in Social or Cultural Anthropology, Sociology or similar. You must have experience with ethnographic research, preferably from a Science & Techology Studies perspective. But most important is that you are a team player and interested in contributing to a lively and creative research community. You need to be able to understand and speak a minimum of German.

We offer a 100% Post Doc position for 4 years. The position will be filled as soon as possible. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact Estrid Sørensen: estrid.sorensen@rub.de

Please note that this is not the official announcement. You will find the official announcement with detail about how to apply here.


Data temporalities: the arts and relevancies of making data last

5. April 2022 via Zoom
As a part oft the 43. congress of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (DGEKW) Laura Kocksch and Estrid Sørensen will hold a presentation with the following abstract:

Open access to research data is increasingly promoted throughout the European Union. Before anyone can access research data, however, these need to be documented, made machine searchable and stored. For some data this alone is a major challenge. Once stored, data also needs maintenance in order to stay accessible. Apart from the infrastructure related requirements such as hardware, electricity bandwidth and staff for the continuous update and development of servers and platforms, data management and data maintenance are required (Sandfeld et al, 2019). The costs, efforts and kinds of these requirements depend among others on the period of time data are stored. The German Research Foundation requires of research data storage of a period of 10 years. The aim is twofold: to allow third parties to re-use the data and to enable re-examination of data validity (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 2015). In our interviews with 11 German researchers from different disciplines (among others plasma physics, medical informatics, theoretical chemistry, economics and ¬geography) about their data practices temporality turned out to be a key point of difference between disciplines. While 10 years is a brief moment in one discipline, it is an unsurmountable era in another. Due to the enormous amount of data in plasma physics, for instance and the accompanying non-sustainable data storage costs most data are deleted immediately. In Geography, on the other hand, the location data saved decades ago on paper, in images, and on several different digital storage media remain essential for re-use now and in the future. Here, the issue of the temporality of data comes with more than the general requirements mentioned above. The conversion of data from older formats to new ones and the sustained readability of older formats require continuous work. The paper suggests the notions of “data durability” and of “data durability devices” to draw attention to how data achieve their durability and what social, material and epistemic devices are involved in this.

More information about the event can be found here.



Re-identification as a multiple problem - Who am I, and if so, so what?

19. January 2022, via Zoom
Jan Schmutzler and Lukas Plätz will hold a presentation at the SecHuman research school about Re-identification of personal research data. The re-identification of personal research data has been a much-discussed research topic at least since the de-anonymisation attacks carried out by Latanya Sweeney in the 1990s. For a long time, this was primarily a problem of small special populations, in which the circle of potential matches is limited from the outset. Therefore, medical data was primarily affected. However, the steadily increasing amount of data on large parts of the population and improved algorithms now also allow quite reliable re-identifications in highly incomplete data sets, which also brings social science survey data into focus. Working with a leading social science data institute, they will try to find out how the problem is dealt with there. They will talk about how they experienced first-hand that this problem may be very different for them than for the data institute, how they dealt with it and what they learned from it. Together with you, they want to further explore the multiplicity of the problem and develop their further research.


New Funded Project “Designing Self-Care for Increased Health of Older People in the Digital Age”

January - December 2022
The new project “Designing Self-Care for Increased Health of Older People in the Digital Age” will be granted seed funding within the MIRAI 2.0 Call for Japan-Sweden collaborative projects. Ryoko Asai is going to participate in the project as a visiting researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden. The project duration will be from January to December 2022. More details on Mirai 2.0 can be found here.



Blue, Red, Pink Values in IT Development

24. November 2021, Ruhr-University Bochum and via Zoom
As part of the SecHuman Winter School 2021 Estrid Sørensen and Solange Martinez Demarco give a talk on the diversity values in IT-Development. The lack of diversity in the field of technology, and more in general in STEM disciplines, is a well-researched topic. However, the focus has mainly been on the low percentage of women in the academic world and professional field of IT, less on the little diverse culture in the field and how it shapes the products and services. In this presentation we will adopt a 3-step approach. Firstly, we will focus on the general arguments behind the ‘leaky pipeline’ model and the business case for diversity as they set the ground for the analysis of the gender gap. Secondly, we will embrace a feminist perspective to critically introduce the shortcomings of these framings and the need for studying the culture and values of technology communities and IT development. Finally, we will centre on the specificities of cybersecurity and propose an alternative perspective that challenges the types of security that matter and for whom. Please find the full programme for the Winter School here as well as instructions on how to register.



Designing self-care for better health in older people in the digital age

November 2021, Lund University
Ryoko Asai and her colleague at Lund University in Sweden will begin a new research project this November on "Designing self-care for better health in older people in the digital age". Their project has been granted as an academia/Industry collaborations project by the Swedish funding association Vinnova. You can find more information here.


RUSTlab Lectures

Winter term 2021/22, Ruhr-University Bochum and via Zoom
The programme for the sixth episode in the RUSTlab Lecture series is now available. This term the lectures will be in hybrid format: both on-line and on-site. The theme will be "Data Concepts: Key terms in Experimentalist Data Studies," and Speakers include Cornelius Schubert (TU-Dortmund), Rachel Douglas-Jones (IT-U Copenhagen), Sebastian Merkel (RUB) and Markus Rudolfi (Frankfurt). Please find more information here. Everyone is most welcome!



From a discrete to a relational notion of data and the consequences for data protection

22. October 2021, Ruhr-University Bochum (HGC 30)
In the lecture series "Security Paradoxes: Intra- and Interdisciplinary Aspects of Security in Law" organised by Prof. Dr. Ingke Goeckenjan, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sebastian Golla, Prof. Dr. Arndt Kiehnle and Dr. Isabella Risini at the Faculty of Law at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Estrid Sørensen will give the first lecture focusing on a relational concept of data. In recent decades, researchers in the social and cultural sciences have been working on a new concept of data that focuses on the relationships that bring data into being. Such a notion has important consequences for thinking about data protection.



Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference

6. October – 9. Oktober 2021, Toronto and worldwide (virtual)
Laura Kocksch, Estrid Sørensen, and Julie Mewes will participate in this year’s Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in virtual Toronto. They present two talks, first on “Coding the RUSTlab. Discussing, Writing and Living an STS lab”, collectively authored by lab members Julie Mewes, Laura Kocksch, Estrid Sørensen, Ryoko Asai, Olga Galanova, Abigail Delgado, Susana Carmona, Stefan Laser, and Raphael Hemme. The second talk concerns “stsing: Doing STS in, through and beyond the German Academic System”. More information can be found here.



Data Durabilities: Towards Conceptualizations of Scientific Long-Term Data Storage

5. October 2021
With the increased requirement for open data and data reuse in the sciences the call for long-term data storage becomes stronger. However, long-term data storage is insufficiently theorized and often considered as simply short-term data that are stored longer. Based on interviews with scientists at a German university Estrid Sørensen and Laura Kocksch show in their newly published article in the Engagement with Science, Technology and Society Journal that data are not in themselves durable; they are made durable. With the notion of data durability devices they inquire into technologies and tools, techniques and skills as well as organizational arrangements, cultural norms and relations that contribute to making data durable. Data durability, then, is the period of time in which they can operate in a socio-technical apparatus and uphold their capacity to make claims about the world.


The impact of working from home and distance learning on family relationships: Viewpoint of sharing information and privacy

2. October 2021, Japan
Ryoko Asai and her colleague from the University of Toyama (Japan) will present their research “the impact of working from home and distance learning on family relationships: viewpoint of sharing information and privacy” at the annual conference of the Japan Society for Information and Management (JSIM) on the 2nd of October.

Asai, R. and Yanagihara, S. (2021), The Impact of working from home and distance learning on family relationships: viewpoint of sharing information and privacy, the proceeding of the Annual Conference of Information Management, pp.49-52.

At the conference, Ryoko Asai will receive the Young Investigator Award for her research presentation. The detailed information about the research is following. You can find the conference info (in Japanese) here.



Re-imagining river restoration: Temporalities, landscapes and values of the Emscher set in a post-mining environment

30. September 2021, Virtual University of Bremen
At the DGSKA 2021 conference, Estrid Sørensen and Stefan Laser will give a presentation on the restoration of the Emscher River in a post-mining environment. They will introduce three concepts that are relevant to understanding the restoration of the river: landscape, temporality and value. Through three stories, they explore these dimensions in different constellations and ask how they can help to reimagine the river and its restoration. Engaging with the river provides insights into how human and more-than-human assemblages are adapting to the Anthropocene. The event will take place online. More information can be found here.



Digital Methods and Critique

9. September – 10. September 2021, Goethe-University Frankfurt
Soon a workshop will take place which is related to Science and Technology studies. Digitalization has become a part of the daily life of everyone. Step by step it becomes more difficult to avoid the use of technical tools and devices. In comparison to this development a scientific and critical analysis of these tools is often missed out. This is one of the reasons why the participants of this workshop will discuss and talk through digital methods and critical parts of it. Furthermore, one goal of the workshop is to network with interested people.


"Matters of Sleep" will be featured in the upcoming international exhibition "The World is in You"

30. September - 16. January 2022, Kunsthal Charlottenborg
The research by Julie Mewes on the "Matters of Sleep", which she has been conducting in Arctic Norway as a postdoc at CUPAK, will be featured in the upcoming international exhibition "The World is in You" curated by the Medical Museoin in the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, one of the largest exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Northern Europe located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her Matters of Sleep will materialize in an audio feature. The exhibition will take place from 30th September 2021 until 16th January 2022. More information can be found here.



Welcome to Lisa Vogel

15. August 2021
We warmly welcome Lisa Vogel as a student assistent to the CUPAK team. Lisa is a Bachelor-Student of Social Science at the Ruhr-University and we know her well from her excellent engagements in seminars. We look very much forward to our collaboration.



Network Now - presentation of a student data project

22. July 2021 via Zoom
The results of the seminar "Studying environmental data participatory and interdisciplinary" that was instructed by Laura Kocksch, Estrid Sørensen and Michael Kallweit are presented at the event. With the title "Vernetzt Jetzt" (network now) a student group consisting of social science and applied informatics students have over two terms studied and engaged with the many groups of activities, NGOs, institutions and city agencies that are involved in making Bochum a more sustainable city. They encountered a large number active people, but also uncovered that they do not seem well connected. Through interviews, data sprints, document analysis and several digital methods, the group is now ready to present their result to the public. Apart from presenting their results they have developed a tool to help people network. The webpage will be presented on the virtual event and can also be accessed here.


Speculative data visualisations as experimentalist devices for anthropological knowledge production

22. July 2021, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
At the 'Anthropology beyond text? Experiments, devices and platforms of multimodal ethnographic practice' Workshop organzied by the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology (Ignacio Farías and Tomás Criado) Estrid Sørensen presents her explorations of speculative data visualisations. Inspired by among others Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers Estrid experiments with creating data visualisations as imaginations that escape formalisms, and thus disturb what data visualisations generally tend to do. Their aim is not to depict an actual situation, but to work as boundary objects for exchange across differences (thus also drawing on American Pracmatism). Speculative data visualisations however do have real-world relations and are committed to real-world concerns, but seek to position themselves between categories and at the brink of the familiar and the unfamiliar to allow alternative imaginations of such concerns.


International conference ETHICOMP

30. June 2021, online
Ryoko Asai will join the international conference ETHICOMP 2021 in June 2021. She will present her current research on social robots and children’s wellbeing from the information ethics perspective there.

Asai, R. (2021), Ethics and Social Robots: How do I live with a social robot?. Normal Technology Ethics: Proceedings of the ETHICOMP 2021, Universidad de La Rioja, pp. 281-284. ISBN: 9788409286713 [Titel anhand dieser ISBN in Citavi-Projekt übernehmen]

You can find the details on ETHICOMP 2021 online.



The micro-practices of not-only-IT-Security

23. June 2021, 12 hrs, SecHuman, Ruhr-University Bochum
At the SecHuman Colloquium Jan Schmutzler and Estrid Sørensen discuss their approach to the protection against re-identification of linked data. Following a Science & Technology Studies sensitivity we will inquire the IT-security issue that anonymized data are re-identified when more data sets are brought together. This most often happens through so-called big data analyses. Allthough the data in each data set are anonymized, it becomes possible to identify the persons behind the data when sevral data sets are linked. We approch the question of re-identification of linked data as a cultural phenomenon, and thus one that pervades diverse practices and is difficult to delimit. We inquire how the problem of re-identification of linked data emerge as a problem for social scientists, how the problem is attended to and maintained, and how the framing of the problem as a problem of re-identification may be in conflict with or accompanied by other framings. Moreover, we centrally look into which cascade effects the concern about re-identification has, for the organisation archiving the data and for the knowledge produced with the data.


Re-Imagining River Restoration

21. June 2021
We are happy to announce the publication of Stefan Laser's and Estrid Sørensen's paper on "Re-Imagining River Restoration. Temporalities, Landscapes and Values of the Emscher Set in a Post-Mining Environment" in a special issue of Berliner Blätter on "Environment Ecological Ontologies: Approaching Human-Environmental Engagements", edited by Michaela Meuer and Kathrin Eitel. The paper inquires how to engage with a river that flows through the Ruhr Area in Germany and has changed through the centuries just as much as has the former heavily industrialized region. It discovers stories of three different ontologies of the river in their empirical material and add a fourth, less hopeful story of the river as a desperately sustained ruin. Please find the open access publication here.



Infrastructuring virtual lifeworlds: Archives, Data Centres and Autonomous Mobility

18. June 2021, RUSTlab, Ruhr-University Bochum
Infrastructures are digital, but they are also virtual in the sense of incorporating potentiality. Infrastructures enable interactions, knowledge and spaces to emerge, while also themselves being shaped through the potentials of interactions, knowledge and spaces. In the RUSTlab Lectures Estrid Sørensen will together with Simon Rothöhler and Florian Sprenger discuss infrastructures as virtual by addressing three different research areas: virtual archives, university datacentres and virtual environments generated through driver assistant systems’ calculations for autonomous vehicles. Driver assistant system model a world for cars to be able to drive autonomously, without representing this world. Virtual archives generate transformed spheres of potentialities of depositing, sorting and classifying data and of making data accessible. Although impressive buildings, the way in which university datacentres actually shape knowledge production seems equally invisible and powerful as the way in which warehouses shape markets and libraries shape understanding and experience. Virtual archives, data centres and driver assistant systems each contribute to shaping new digital infrastructures. We examine the way in which they are also conditions for emergence of virtuality and offer modalities for the virtual to unfold.


Data Sprint on "Open Data"

11. June 2021, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
Laura Kocksch conducts a data sprint with humanities students and data ethics professionals on the topic "open data". Based on twitter and scopus publication data, the group searches for where and when "ethics" are mentioned in relation to open data. The sprint is part of Laura's fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. She organized the sprint with her colleagues Mace Ojala from the IT University in Kopenhagen and Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda from the AAU Klagenfurt.



“Matters of Arctic sleep: Hospital staff’s shifting sleep routines and its devices-in-use”

20./21. May 2021
Julie is looking forward to present at this year’s Nordic Science and Technology Studies Conference 2021 taking place May 20-21 in (virtual) Copenhagen. She will talk about her ongoing research focusing on the “Matters of Arctic sleep: Hospital staff’s shifting sleep routines and its devices-in-use”.


New book with a chapter contribution on Gender and Computing

May 2021
A new book about information ethics will be published in Japan in May 2021. Ryoko Asai contributed with her colleague to a book chapter on Gender and Computing. You can find the details (in Japanese) on the book here.



“Robots and AI Artifacts in Plural Perspective(s) of Japan and the West”

31. March 2021
Ryoko and her colleagues from Japan and Sweden published a new article “Robots and AI Artifacts in Plural Perspective(s) of Japan and the West: The Cultural–Ethical Traditions Behind People’s Views on Robots and AI Artifacts in the Information Era” in the Review of Socionetwork Strategies by Springer. The article examines how perceptions of interaction between human and robot vary from country to country, and how societal and cultural differences affect the people’s views based on comparative surveys between Japan and Sweden. The article is available on Springer Nature website (open access).


Inquiring the digital interstice through a data sprint: Ethnographic research where front and back end meet

22. March 2021, Kassel University
On the 11th International New Materialisms Conference "New Materialist Informatics" Laura Kocksch and Estrid Sørensen jointly organise a workshop together with Jakob Roschka, Fabian Pittroff (both Kassel University) and Stefan Laser (Siegen). The workshop participants will work in a data sprint mode with data material a) from the configuration of a power system modeling tool, b) a biking exercise tracking tool c) and from the planning of a data centre. Working creatively with these data conceptual prototypes will be developed of how to empirically relevant understand the interstices between front end and back end. More information you can find here.



Welcome to Jan Schmutzler

15. March 2021
As a new doctoral student of the SecHuman graduate school Jan Schmutzler has joined the Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge team. Over the next three and a half years he will do research into the protection from re-identification of persons when anonymous data are linked. The problem here is that when data are combined from several data sets, you may via big data analytics bring several data sets together that all include information about one (or most often more) particular individual. Linking up to seven data sets where the same person figures anonyously it is indeed possible to identify that person, even if the data are anonymised in all the data sets. The task of the PhD project will be together with a PhD student from Mathematics to study how protection against such re-identification of anonymised data is socio-materially achieved. On the one hand algorithms will be developed that make re-identification in the data unlikely. On the other hand, formal and informal social practices, such as organisational structures, sharing conventions and research procedures that prevent researchers from re-identifying individauals in data sets will be studied. Jan Schmutzler has a background in political science from the University of Jena and a degree in interdisciplinary anthropology from the University of Freiburg. We are looking so much forward to collaborating!



"Timing Sleep: Shift work, the Artic and finding the right time to sleep"

10. March 2021
We are thrilled to annouce, that Julie Mewes will be presenting at this year's 2nd Temporal Belongings conference. She is very much looking forward to talk about "Timing Sleep: Shift work, the Artic and finding the right time to sleep" in the panel "Resisting the impositions of standard time". The conference, meeting under the theme "Materialities of time" this year, will be held in a virtual format. More information you can find here.


“Data Sprints” for Heterogeneous Issue Experts on Data Management and Data Storage

Centre for Advanced Internet Studies, CAIS NRW Bochum
Laura presents her new project as a CAIS Fellow in the weekly public Lecture. In three data sprints the project sets out to define and map current challenges in managing and storing research data. The data sprints invite heterogeneous actors to design data management and storage systems, procedure and documentation. Please contact Laura if you are interested in her project or want to participate in a data sprint. Details on Laura's project can be found on the CAIS hompeage.


"Caring for Cybersecurity: Taking a stand against 'factors research'"

4. March 2021, 12:00 hrs, Royal Holloway, University of London (online)
In einem eingeladenen Vortrag der Information Security Group am Royal Holloway, University of London trägt Laura Kocksch über ihr Dissertationsthema vor. Sie bearbeitet Schwierigkeiten und Möglichkeiten eines Ansatzes zu Cybersicherheit, der auf langfristigen Verantwortlichkeiten und nicht-Konformität beruht. Anders als jene Ansätze, die menschliche, technische oder organisatorische Faktoren betrachten, schafft ihr Ansatz Hybridität und Multiplizität von Cybersicherheitspraktiken in den Vordergrund zu stellen. Informationen zur Veranstaltung finden Sie hier.


Presentation during the Energy and Society conference

10th-12th February 2021
Stefan presents about his exploratory research on material cycling cultures during the 5th “Energy and Society” conference, 10th-12th February 2021, in cooperation with ESA RN 12, ISA RN 24, and the Urban Europe Research Alliance (UERA). The title of his talk: Cycling on and through digital platforms, or: What happens when data centres shape the mobility of athletes?


Talk on waste in social theory

21./22.01.2021, Co-hosted by the University of Frankfurt
Stefan gives a talk at a digital conference, where he presents his research on waste and valuation in social theory (title of the paper: "Abfall. Die Wertfrage"). The workshop focuses on ecological matters in social theory ("Die ökologische Frage. Herausforderung für die soziologische Theorie"). It is hosted by the section of social theory of the German Sociological Association (DGS).

The conference grapples with a key current issue. Here's an excerpt (translated) from the intro. "Ecological problems are among the central challenges of the present and thus have a profound transformation potential for society as a whole. The sociological treatment of the ecological question in disciplinary silos such as environmental sociology thus reaches its limits. In order to understand ecological phenomena as an integral feature of contemporary society, the ecological question must become a matter of sociological theory."

Stefan's contribution draws on his research on e-waste and brings together waste and valuation studies to discuss the role of wasting practices in structuring value production and thus society.


Experimentalist Data Studies: toward a pragmatist mode of operating through (not-only) digital data

16. December 2020, 16-17:30 hrs, Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies, Twente University

Critical Data Studies, Data Studies for the Social Good, Digital Sociology, Digital Methods and Participatory Data Design are among the labels currently used to designate new ways of engaging with digital data from a theoretically informed, often qualitative social science or humanities sensitivity, as opposed to computational social science approaches. Coining the notion of Experimentalist Data Studies I have recently initiated an attempt to systematize pragmatist modes of operating with and through not-only digital data. The experimentalist approach (1) grounds knowledge production in current problems, (2) takes the often contested production of knowledge through digital data as an opportunity to revisit social science’s methods and concepts, (3) and mobilises digital data for collaborative knowledge production to strengthen capacities for understanding complex problems and envisioning possible futures. Unlike computational social science’s use of digital data for fact production, experimentalist data studies focus on the modi operandi of knowledge production that digital data, data analytics tools and data visualisation make possible. The talk discusses the conceptual background for experimentalist data studies along with a few examples.


Data Durabilities: Towards Conceptualizations of Scientific Long-Term Data Storage

11. December, 12:30-14:30 hrs, ITU-Copenhagen
At the DATA TIMES: IMMEDIACIES, LIFECYCLES, FORGETTINGS conference at the IT-University in Copenhagen, Estrid Sørensen and Laura Kocksch give a talk on data durabilities. The paper is based on interviews with scientists about their data practices. Even though funding organisations have a clear requirement that all research data should be stored for ten years, and even though all scientists clearly support this, data turn out in practice to have very different durabilities. Crucially, we discovered that scientists apply different “devices” for making data durable – or for making them expire. We differentiate between “media durability devices” and “scientific durability devices,” and describe in more detail how these work in practice. More information you can find here: https://www.dasts.dk/?tribe_events=data-as-relation-final-conference-data-times-immediacies-lifecycles-forgettings



Talk at the Sektionstagung Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung (11th of Dec): the materialities of the digital

11. December 2020
Stefan gives a talk at the Sektionstagung Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung. Check the date and registration information. The presentation is on the 11th of Dec, 1pm. The conference as such stretches from the 10th to the 11th, get in contact with Martina Franzen if you want to participate (ie, get a zoom link). The main topic is "Science and Technology Studies in the Digital Society" [Wissenschafts- und Techniksoziologie in der digitalisierten Gesellschaft: Theorien, Methoden, Perspektiven].

This particular paper will focus on "The materialities of the digital" (Die Materialien des Digitalen). Stefan will use this presentation to discuss both his previous and current research.


Theory and Practice of Experimentalist Data Studies

9. December 2020, 18-20 hrs, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Cultural Anthropology Colloquium
Many scholars are currently occupied with how to conceptualize digitalisation in the social sciences. The discussions range from arguments that social science’s existing conceptual vocabulary is well apt to understand digitalisation to calls for entirely new theories. Based on empirical engagements with digital data and data analytics tools several scholars (e.g. Marres; Rogers) have pointed to crucial challenges that these technologies post to social research. With a point of departure in these insights and with inspiration from Bogusz’s (2018) reading of American Pragmatism Estrid Sørensen will in her talk discuss how to integrate these into Experimentalist Data Studies, in which the mode of operating with (not only) digital data is in focus.


Welcome to Ryoko Asai

1. December 2020
We are extremely happy to be able to welcome Ryoko Asai to our team. Ryoko earned her PhD at the Meiji University in Japan with a doctoral thesis on the political economy of the concept of “gender difference.” She then turned her studies towards the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing both on gender biases in AI and on how AI in children’s products influence child well-being. Apart from at Meiji, Ryoko has taught at the Takasaki University of Commerce, at the Maebashi Kyoai Gakuen College and at the Chuo, Nihon, Rissho, Surugadai and Takushoku Universities in Japan. From 2011-2020 she worked at Uppsala University in Sweden in the Division of Visual Information and Interaction teaching and researching AI and ethics, information ethics, and ethics and human robot interaction. We are so grateful to now have Ryoko in our team at the RUB and we look very much forward to our collaborations.



Board constituted in the new Science & Technology Studies Associations stsing

22. October 2020
The new German association of Science and Technology Studies stsing was formed on 27 October in Berlin and one month later the Board constituted itself. Estrid Sørensen was appointed chairperson together with Paula Helm from the University of Tübingen and Laura Kocksch was appointed substitute chairperson together with Baldeep Grewal from the University of Potsdam. Johanna Sentef from the Goethe-University Frankfurt was appointed Treasurer. Other members of the board are Simon Hirsbrunner from the Free University in Berlin and Kevin Hall from Marburg University are ordinary board members. Click here for more information.



Buch Veröffentlichung: "Wie forschen mit den Science and Technology Studies?" - mit Beitrag von Laura Kocksch

22. October 2020
Der Titel "Wie forschen mit den >Science and Technology Studies< - Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven" belebt die empirische Herkunft der STS wieder und löst so das kritische Versprechen ein, sich stets an Empirie zu messen. Im Sammelband werden verschiedene Konzepte der STS auf ihre empirische Brauchbarkeit und Konsequenzen geprüft. Laura Kocksch trägt mit einem Beitrag zur Wissensproduktion in der IT-Sicherheit bei und diskutiert die Kritik trotz/wegen/in Ko-Laboration mit ihrem Feld. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4379-4/wie-forschen-mit-den-science-and-technology-studies/ ; steht auch in der Sopsa-Lounge zur Leihe bereit (GD E1).



We proudly announce that Julie Mewes will be a part of the GWTF - Conference

19-20. November 2020
Julie will, together with Ingmar Lippert from ITU Copenhagen, talk about "Experimental modes of ethnographic data generation in STS" at the GWTF Annual Meeting from 19. until 20. November 2020. This year's theme is "Die experimentelle Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit: Art, Facts, and Artefacts!" (virtual format, register for free and full programme here)


RUSTlab Lectures for Winter 2020/21

12. November – 28. January 2020
Due to COVID 19, all lectures will be live on ZOOM. You will find the link on the RUSTlab webpage.
Here you find our Lecture series for the current term, which is for Winter 2020/21. Feel free to attend and write an e-mail in case there are texts circulating prior to a lecture. This semester, we have a guiding theme, which is: Data & Experimentalism. We thus specifically inquire into how pragmatist experimentalism can conceptually and practically help re-tooling social scientific practices, and how data may engender, contradict, combine or in other ways be involved in this. Here is a PDF we more details on the theme that we also shared with the presenters. We use this website to document the input from the presenter.



Vacancy: PhD Position in interdiscipliary Cybersecurity Graduate School "SecHuman 2.0": Protection against re-identification of linked data

Deadline 12 November (call will remain open until the right candidate is found)
As a standard, personal and confidential data are anonymised in the social sciences prior to storage and before making data available for re-use. However, studies have shown that if you link a few anonymised data sets, it is indeed possible to re-identifiy the persons behind it. We offer PhD positions for a the SecHuman 2.0 graduate programme to two scholars, who will investigate how re-identification unfolds and how it is possible to protect against it. We are looking for one Math doctoral candidate and one candidate with background and interest in Science & Technology Studies (STS). The latter will be supervised by Estrid Sørensen and become part of the CUPAK team and the RUSTlab. The task of the STS PhD scholar will be to conduct an ethnographic study of how both social and technical data practices in the social sciences enable and protect against re-identification, and of the epistemic effects in social science both of the possibility for re-identification and of the protection against re-identification. The Math and the STS scholar will collaborate in developing processes to protect against re-identification.

Please find the official call here.

Please find more information about the PhD-topic on the protection against re-identification of linked data here.


Lecture Series on Climate Change and Sustainability

22. October 2020
Join the lecture series on climate change and sustainability (WS 20/21). The lecture series aims to take a current and interdisciplinary look at the major social challenges posed by climate change. Since climate change can be understood as a consequence of unsustainable actions (individual as well as collective), the lecture series in Bochum would like to put a special focus on sustainability concepts and their significance from the perspective of the different scientific disciplines involved.

Our very own Stefan Laser also participates with a lecture on climate and the environment, discussing the case of electronic waste. This will be a joint presentation with an input from David Piorunek, who is with the chair of Material Sciences. Find more information here.

The event uses a hybrid format. If you want to participate in person, please register by using the link above.


Movement on and through digital platforms

13. October 2020
On the 16th of October, Stefan presents explorative research at an event of valuation studies/sport sociology. The topic is Strava, The Social Network for Athletes. With Energy Humanities he reflects on the value of sport. What follows from the fact that movement is guided by digital platforms and that watts is the new measure of all things? This paper suggests a new perspective on tracking devices and quantified self practices.



Laura Koksch travels (!) to Switzerland

26-27. August 2020
Laura joins a group of international scholars for a workshop in exploring the socio-cultural fabric of digital (in)security in Cully, Switzerland 26-27.08.2020.


Participation at the EASST/4S conference 2020

18-21. August 2020
We are happy to announce that the RUSTab team will take part at the EASST/4S conference 2020. Throughout the conference we will be organizing a Conference-hub at the RUSTlab where we will stream a selection of the talks. Our team is very thankful for the opportunity to hold the following presentations:

  • Abigail Nieves Delgado: Seeing Like An Algorithm: Facial Recognition Systems And The Politics Of Pattern Recognition (Panel: Unpacking the Foundations of the Current Biometric Moment: Biometric Machinations of Belonging)
  • Julie Sascia Mewes: Timing Sleep: Arctic Sleep Devices And The “Sleep of Any time” (Panel: The ‘elsewhere’ of sociotechnical life at night VR 08)
  • Estrid Sørensen, Laura Koksch: Managing Data-Centres: infrastructuring university “small tech” (Panel: Decentring datacentres: their politics, energy, waste and epistemics)
  • Laura Kocksch: Energy-Data-Scapes. How to transform energy with data. (Panel: Political Data of the Digital Anthropocene: (Justice, Diplomacy and Negotiation) VR 13).
  • Stefan Laser: Restoring a broken landscape? A ‘Pioneering Model’ From The Ruhr Valley, A Former Coal Mining Hub (Panel: Fossil Legacies – Projects, Protests and Promises of Phasing Out Coal VR 04)

Furthermore Estrid Sørensen, Laura Koksch and Stefan Laser organize the panel titled as „Decentring datacentres: their politics, energy, waste and epistemics vir Prague“.

We are looking forward to upcoming projects and new collaborations.



Welcome to Olga Galanova

1. August 2020
We warmly welcome Olga Galanova to our team. Olga holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Bielefeld and she is an expert in Conversation Analysis and the microproduction of social order. She has been associated already a few years with the Chair and we are thrilled to be able to work more closely over the coming years. This has been possible due to Olga's successful application to the German Research Foundation from which she was grated funding to study technologically mediated communication under the condition of surveillance. Her research is based on extremely fascinating and important material from surveillance reports of the German Democratic Republic. We look very much forward to hearing more from her analyses the coming years.


Won FAZIT funding!

21. July 2020
We are thrilled to receive the news that Laura is awarded a FAZIT funding to finish her PhD thesis starting October 2020: http://www.fazit-stiftung.de/.


New special issue on waste and valuation practices

14. July 2020
Stefan just published a new article in a special issue he also co-edited: Dis/Assembling Value, guest edited by Emma Greeson, Stefan Laser and Olli Pyyhtinen. All articles are open access. Go here for the overview: Dis/Assembling Value guest edited by Emma Greeson, Stefan Laser and Olli Pyyhtinen.

This is a special issue that brings together waste studies and valuation studies and puts a focus on materialities. We've got an introductory piece that proposes a specific lens. The article lays emphasis on the intertwined practices and processes of assembling and disassembling value and waste. In her article, “Ecologies of Valuation”, Emma introduces us to ecological thinking and the case of used clothing materialities. The subtractive logic of ridding, it is sown, is crucial in the processes of production and valuation of used goods. In “From Trash to Treasure”, Olli and Turo-Kimmo bring us closer to the (literally) hands-on experience of dumpster diving, introduce Simmel's thinking – and the "scavenger gaze."

Finally, there's Stefan’s analysis of an e-waste high-tech recycling facility: “Sorting, shredding and smelting scrap”. The article shows how processes of "deformation" are linked to the accounting system of the company. Calculations succeed only because things are literally broken. More on this, and the PDF download: https://valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view/179


Laura Kocksch wins a Fellowship at Centre for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS)

02. June 2020
We are very proud to announce that Laura Kocksch has been awarded a CAIS fellowship to join an excellent group of internet researchers at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies. Our interest in experimental data formats will be combined with CAIS commitment to community involvement and public communication. Beginning February 2021, she will plan and organize three "data sprints". The data sprints invite different affected stakeholders to participate in current research data management initiatives and the building of a new eco-friendly data centre at the university.

Please contact Laura for any questions or if you wish to participate: laura.kocksch@rub.de.


Now published: Stefan Laser: Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation

28. March 2020
Stefan Laser published a new book on the recycling of electronic waste. This is a revised version of his dissertation, which is published in German in the peer-reviewed series “Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation”, with Springer VS. See SpringerLink for the access to the book (free PDF access via most of the university libraries). The printed book will be available in mid-June.

Laser, Stefan. 2020. Hightech am Ende: Über das globale Recycling von Elektroschrott und die Entstehung neuer Werte. Soziologie des Wertens und Bewertens. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

In ‘Hightech am Ende’ [High-tech at the end], Stefan Laser follows the value of electronic waste. With the help of ethnographic studies, he discusses a contested law in India, follows the shredding and smelting of discarded electronic gadgets as an employee of a German recycling company, and examines a Google innovation for redesigning smartphones. At the heart of the book is a discussion of the controversial creation of new values. The author identifies high-tech recycling as the dominant political and economic force in dealing with electronic waste – a one-sided strategy that displaces alternatives and does not contribute to the sustainable avoidance of waste. This book draws on methodologies from the field of Science and Technology Studies, and it wants to discuss valuation practices by thinking through waste.

There is also a public website that aims to make this publication more accessible for a wider public: https://www.hightech-am-ende.de/


Welcome to Kevin Schmidt and Fenja Meiß

1. February 2020
Kevin Schmidt and Fenja Meiss study social science at Ruhr-University Bochum and join the CUPAK team as assistants. We warmly welcome them and look very much forward to collaborate.


Standards and Everyday Work Practice: The Afterlife of Standards

28. January 2020
At the TMF (Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V. [Technology, Methods, and Infrastructure for Networked Medical Research]) Laura Kocksch and Estrid Sørensen will give a talk at the work group "Data Protection". While the focus of TMF is to develop guidelines for data protection in medical research, Laura and Estrid discuss how standards are dealt with as challenges of everyday work practices; and how such practical knowledge can be integrated into the standard development process.


Studentische Hilfskraft gesucht (WHK/SHK)

5. December 2019
Am Lehrstuhl von Estrid Sørensen (Sozialwissenschaft, Kulturpsychologie und Wissensanthropologie) sind ab Februar 2020 zwei Hilfskraftstellen mit jeweils sechs Wochenstunden zu vergeben. Zu den Aufgaben zählen vor allem textredaktionelle Arbeiten (z. B. Korrektur von Literaturverweisen), Unterstützung bei der Durchführung von der Lehre (z. B. Moodle) und Literaturrecherche und -beschaffung. Bewerben kann sich jeder sozialwissenschaftlich Studierende ab dem 4. Semester. Weitere Informationen auch zu dem Bewerbungsverfahren finden Sie hier.


Welcome to Julie Mewes

1. December 2019
We warmly welcome Julie Sascia Mewes to join our team. Julie received her PhD in European Ethnology in 2018 at the Humboldt University Berlin based on a fascinating thesis on socio-material practices of psychiatric occupational therapy. Since then she has been working in a citizen science project at the Technische Universität Berlin, researching the practices and aesthetics of tasting food. A successful funding application to the DAAD P.R.I.M.E. program allowed her to move to the Ruhr University, where she will be studying "Matters of Sleep: Sleep devices in the everyday life of Norwegian hospital staff". The first twelve months Julie will physically be at the TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at Oslo University. But she will be with us in spirit. We look very much forward to collaborating.



Care for Objects: Staying Grounded in an Age of Big Data

21-22. November 2019, Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw, Poland
At the XI Learning Adventures Conference with the title "Power(lessness) of Objects in STEM Discoverty" Estrid Sørensen will give a keynote lecture on data and the question of data's relation to that which it is about, and about the consequences of knowing through data. For more information visit the event website here.



Mapping and Coordinating Cultural- and Social Studies of Science and Technology in Germany

8. November 2019, Technische Universität Berlin
Together with colleagues from Aachen, Berlin and Munich Estrid Sørensen is co-organising a meeting that for the first time brings together the diverse scholarly networks and associations in Germany that engage with social and cultural studies of science and technology. The aim of the meeting is to clarify the specific aims of each of the networks in order to better collaborate and coordinate our efforts. For more information see here.


Politicizing data: Data visualisation and participatory data practices

8. November 2019, Sociology, Technische Universität zu Berlin
At the 2019 Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung (GWTF) Estrid Sørensen will give a talk on the current trend to apply data in democratizing and participatory ways. This is a move from Critical Data Studies. This is a move from Critical Data Studies to what Estrid - paraphrasing Lucy Suchman - calls Artful Data Integration. For this events schedule and more information see here.


Technologies of Autonomy: A dance of indulgence and care

26.-25. October 2019, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Universität zu Köln
At the meeting "Posthumanistische Medienbildung" [Posthuman Media Education] Estrid Sørensen was invited to talk about how we can think about autonomy in a posthumanist logic. Drawing on the notion of "care" and on Antoine Hennion's work Estrid suggests a relational way of thinking about autonomy that does not exclude the presence of dependence. For more information see here.


RUSTlab Lectures Winter Term 2019/2020

Universitätstr. 104, Room 201, Thursdays 16-18 hrs
The RUSTlab is happy to announce an exciting programme for the winter term combining topics on data, algorithms and digitalisation with issues concerning sustainablity, ecology and life 'at the end of the world'. More information and the full schedule can be found on the RUSTlab-Website here.



Conference proceeding „Methoden umweltsoziologischer Forschung“ published

October 2019
The 15th annual meeting of the young researcher’s network of environmental sociology in 2018 was organised by Markus Rudolfi, Lukas Sattlegger and Larissa Deppisch. The theme was “Methoden umweltsoziologischer Forschung” (Engl.: methods of environmental sociological research) with the aim to start a discussion of the methodical particularities that emerge in current research projects in the field of environmental sociology. There is now a conference proceeding available with most of the contributions from the meeting. Download the whole volume here.



Laura Kocksch @GI Jahrestagung in Kassel

23.-26. September 2019, Kassel
Along with her colleague Andreas Poller (Fraunhofer SIT), Laura Kocksch presents her work at the annual conference of the society for informatics (Gesellschaft für Informatik) in Kassel. From their 2017 and 2018 papers on IT security and its organizational, material and social dimensions, they follow a "caring" approach that informatics demonstrates towards society. How can technology development be developed in a participatory wax? And, how can the values that in technologies (i.e., what needs protection) be turned into a matter of public concern? They argue that it needs "hybrid forums" as well as new interdisciplinary teaching courses that can foster accountability for technologies in society. The slides can be found at Laura's academia.edu page under http://ruhr-uni-bochum.academia.edu/LauraKocksch


Conference „Great Transformation: The Future of Modern Society”

23.-27. September 2019, Jena
The University of Jena hosts the final conference by the DFG research group “De-Growth Societies” and simultaneously the 2. Regional conference of the German Sociological Association. Stefan Laser and Markus Rudolfi will present at this event their projects on “Thinking through waste. A Critical Extension of the Post-Growth Debate“ (Panel by Stefan Laser) and on “Verstetigtes Provisorium: Experimentalisierte Nachhaltigkeit im Baurecht” (Presentation by Markus Rudolfi). More information on the conference under: https://www.great-transformation.uni-jena.de/

Welcome to Stefan Laser

Mittwoch, 5. September 2019
We warmly welcome Stefan Laser to join the CUPAK team. Stefan holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Kassel. His thesis was an ethnography of IT-waste practices in Germany and India, so his competencies nicely fits to our interests in both digitalisation and human-environment dynamics. Stefan´s furthermore proficient in Science and Technology Studies and was a leading force in organising the 2019 STS organisation conference at the University of Kassel. At the RUB he will be teaching courses on Science & Technology Studies, on human-environment dynamics and on digitalisation, just as he will be a core figure in the RUSTlab. We look very much forward to the collaboration.



Mapping and Labbing with Helen Verran (Darwin)

Mittwoch, 4. September 2019, 14-18 Uhr, RUSTlab, Universitätstr. 104, Raum 234
We are happy to announce our upcoming workshop with Helen Verran about "Mapping and Labbing". We'll discuss carteography and datavisualisation as story-telling methods in the social sciences: What stories do they tell? In what ways are these relevant? And for what? What is the difference between maps and datavisualisations? What are the similarities? And what kind of space is a lab for spatial visualisation? Everyone is welcome to join, but please let us know in advance: rustlab@rub.de



Measured Lives: Theoretical Psychology in an Era of Acceleration

19-23 August, Copenhagen
The theme of this year's conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology is "Measured Lives: Theoretical Psychology in an Era of Acceleration". Raphael Hemme will report on the findings from his ongoing PhD rersearch in a talk on the "Translations of Emotion: An Analysis of Emotion Markup Language 1.0". Together with Lotte Huniche Estrid Sørensen will present their paper on "Phenomenon-driven research and systematic research assembling – a methodological approach to reflexive engagement with psychology´s epistemic project". For more information about the conference, see the official conference website.


Gute Gründe für Schlechte Dokumentationspraktiken

August 2019
Together with Josefine Raasch - a former member of the Chair - Estrid Sørensen had edited the book on good reasons for bad documentation practices with the subtitle "Wie Kinder beschrieben werden". It is a result of an InStudies study project and reports from students' research and practitioners' experience with documentation of children. The book contains original research from kindergartens and children's homes, midwifery, legal credibility tests of children and courts' documentation of children. The book can be found here.



Psychology's Epistemic Project

August 2019
Lotte Huniche (Southern Danish University) and Estrid Sørensen has finally completed their ambitious project on psychology's epistemic projects and published a special issue of the journal Theory & Psychology on this topic. Based on original empirical research the special issue contains discussions of how psychology deals with concepts, with Popper's critical realism, with violence, with the colonialism, and with students of very different backgrounds compared to the authors of psychological theory, just as a paper by the editors suggests a method that combines psychological epistemologies with empirical observations in their paper on "Penomenon-driven Research and Systematic Research Assembling: Methodological conceptualisations for psychology’s epistemic projects". The issue is accessible here.


Standardizing the Context and Contextualizing the Standard

August 2019
In M. J. Prutsch's edited volume on "Science, Numbers and Politics" Estrid Sørensen has together with Radhika Gorur (Deakin) and Bryan Maddox contributed an article on how the international large scale assessment programme PISA has been translated into PISA for development, which is an educational assessment scheme for low and middle income countries. The chapter examines how PISA has to be adapted to local contexts, while these contexts also need to be adapted to the PISA scheme. The book can be found here.



TransParkNet Meeting

11-14 June, Kuusamo (Finland)
The Transboundary Park programme of the EUROPARC Federation annually organises the TransParcNet meeting, where members of so-called Transboundary Protected Areas gather and exchange thoughts and ideas about the management of national parks that cross international borders. Together with Maria Hußlein from the Bavarian Forest National Park, Markus Rudolfi will give a talk at this year’s TransParcNet meeting which takes place in Ounlanka National Park in Kuusamo, Finland.



Workshop on Interdisciplinarity and Keynote by Prof. Andrew Barry (UCL)

8 Mai 2019, Bochum
RUSTlab organizes a one-day event on interdisciplinarity in cybersecurity research accompanied by a keynote by Prof. Andrew Barry (UCL) on „What is an interdisciplinary problem?“. The workshop explores further directions in the SecHuman PhD program. For more information see: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/co-laborating/


A tribute to Stefan Beck

Mai 2019
Our dear friend and the inspiring anthropologist of science and technology, Stefan Beck, died suddently and far too young in 2012. As a tribute to his work, a collection of scholars present their reading of different parts of his ouvre. Together with Tanja Bogusz Estrid Sørensen have contributed to the double volume of Berliner Blätter with a chapter titled "Mit Stefan Becks "Sachen, Tat-sachen und Tatsachen" und "The Problem of Expertise" denken". The book can be aquired here.



Start of the RUSTlab Machine Room sessions

Summer term, Bochum
The RUSTlab Machine Room workshops work to shape experimental spaces and tools for resetting methods for social studies of science and technology. Guests are welcome, please forward a small note in advance to: rustlab@ruhr-uni-bochum.de. The meetings take place in Universitätsstraße 104, Room 234. More information, including the workshop plan, are available under: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/machine-room/



Start of the RUSTlab lectures

Summer term, Bochum
The RUSTLab´s first lecture series starts on the 10th of May and continues throughout the summer. Everyone is warmly welcomed to join. The lectures take place in Universitätsstraße 104, Room 201. For more information, including the lecture plan, please visit: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/rustlab-lectures/



Ethnography Workshop @ RUB

11-13 March 2019, Bochum
Together with Clément Dréano (University of Amsterdam), Markus Rudolfi co-organises the 11th PhD-workshop on ethnographic research. The workshop takes place from 11th-13th of March at the Ruhr-University, there are over 40 registrations and many interesting projects which will be discussed in four self-organised groups. The four groups are divided into (1) planning, (2) in the field, (3) back from the field/at the desk, and (4) writing up/presenting. The workshop is a student-led and self-organised event that takes place every year at varying places with the aim to talk about the struggles of ethnographic research and exchange experiences.
For more information see: https://ethnodoks.wordpress.com/



Let's talk about wild boars

04-08 March 2019, Prague
From 4th to 8th of March, Markus Rudolfi was invited to visit the “Bewildering Boar” project team in Prague. The TANDEM project between the Centre français de recherche en sciences social (CEFRES) and The Czech Academy of Science (CAS) deals with “The changing cosmopolitics of the hunt in Europe and beyond”. We’re going to talk about the different roles the wild boar plays in our research, discuss possible similarities and connections between the projects and think about plans for future exchanges in Prague and Bochum. We are looking forward to extending our themes at the CUPAK chair with an anthropology that engages with more than humans in ethnographic research.
For more information about the project see: https://boar.hypotheses.org/



Welcome to Jannik Broer

01 March 2019
Jannik Broer studies social science at the Ruhr-University Bochum and joins the CUPAK team as an assistant. We warmly welcome him amongst the team and look very much forward to collaborating.


CUPAK @ STS in Germany meeting in Kassel

20 February 2019, Kassel
On 20th and 21st of February, the CUPAK team comes together with 70 other researchers in Science and Technology Studies to ask "how to organize STS in Germany?". We get inspiration from activist and interdisciplinary movements in other countries and discuss intensely about what innovative ways we want to come together as a researcher community. While Estrid was part of the organization team, Raphael, Markus and Laura participated in smaller working groups on questions like: how to teach STS and how to make STS in Germany visible to different publics. Please check out twitter #stsing.



Lighting talk about previous CUPAK events @CAISnrw

12 February 2019, Bochum
On February 12th, Laura presents her experiences on "how to apply for research grands and organize events at CAISnrw" at the kick off event for the CAISnrw phdnet. CAIS provides funding for small-scale events, working groups and fellowships that engage in innovative research on the intersection of computer science, social science and economics.



CUPAK Team in Copenhagen to discuss new Science and Technology Studies lab @RUB

17-21 January 2019, Copenhagen
Between January 17th and 21st, Estrid Sørensen, Markus Rudolfi and Laura Kocksch will visit Science & Technology Studies labs in Copenhagen. At TANTlab (University of Aalborg) they will learn about "re-tooling ethnography" with digital methods and discuss how these new tools can be used for research in a responsible way. They will also meet with the co-head and the two current lab managers of the ETHOSlab (IT University Copenhagen) who fill their lab with innovative ideas for STS research.

In a one-day workshop, Sørensen, Rudolfi and Kocksch will meet with international researchers who are in the process of starting their own labs at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia, and at the Royal Danish Military Academy in Frederiksberg, Denmark. Among strategical topics such as financing and equipment, the following questions will be discussed: For what kinds of data do we need more experimental approaches? What is the role of digital data and how do we use digital methods to improve ethnographic storytelling (and not replace it)? How can we equip our ethnographic fields with what kind of tools in order to make emergent concerns more visible? And how do we use these new tools in a careful manner?



Re-worlding land, epistemology and community in the Anthropocene

14 Januar 2019, Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations, Humboldt-Universität Berlin
Estrid Sørensen and Susana Carmona present their work in progress studying the mundane, situated practices in three field-sites across the world through which communities reinvent the configurations of land, community and knowledge. It is through such practices that the Anthropocene is experienced, imagined, enacted and reinvented. What can we learn from their practices and imaginaries, about how re-worlding comes about?

Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations


Welcome to Susanna Carmona Castillo

01 December 2018
Susana Carmona holds a MA degree in Anthropology from the University of Bogotá, Columbia and is just about to finish her PhD at the same university on open-pit mining. She has now joined our team as a Post Doc scholar and will be working on a project about the co-constitution of knowledge, land and community. We warmly welcome Susana in our team and look very much forward to collaborating. Please find more on Susana's web page.

 



PhD Workshop with Helen Verran

05 December 2018, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Being one of the most profound international epistemologists, Helen Verran from Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia, is coming to Bochum again. The CUPAK-Chair has organised a PhD workshop with Helen Verran on Wednesday, 5 December, 2 p.m. - 4 p.m., FNO 02/11.   The workshop is themed as ‘Practicalities of Doing Qualitative Research’ and will discuss the following topics:  - narrating the story of research projects when starting to work with the field - writing field notes - conceptualising  - writing and teaching ethnographies, structuring texts.   Helen Verran is known for being generously supportive of students’ work and for providing practical and conceptual help in a variety of research areas. PhD students who are interested in joining this workshop are cordially welcomed. Please register for the workshop with Josefine.Raasch@ruhr-uni-bochum.de.


Quantum cryptography and care practices

23 November 2018, Horst-Görst Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
On the annual meeting of SecHuman Laura Kocksch presented a paper together with Alexander Helms titled "Quantenkryptographie und Praktiken des Kümmerns in einer unsicheren Zukunft. Über Aushandlungen von Sicherheit" [Quantum cryptography and care practices in an unsure Future. About the negotiations of security".



Welcome to Markus Rudolfi

15 November 2018
Markus Rudolfi holds a MA in sociology from the University of Frankfurt and has done several ethnographies on sustainable practices. He has now joined our team as a PhD student and as co-ordinator for building an STS Lab. We warmly welcome him to our team and look forward to profitable collaborations. Please find more about him on his website.



Equivocal (anthropo)cenes

7-8 November 2018, Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile
On the Workshop "Equivocal (anthropo)cenes: indigenous ontologies and the ethics of geo-climatic disruptions" at the Universidad Católica in Santiago de Chile Estrid Sørensen presented the paper "Co-habitation through experiments of co-laboration in rural energy development" co-authored together with Susana Carmona.



CSCW 2018

03-07 November 2018, New York City
On the annual ACM conference on computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) in New York City, Laura Kocksch presented her work on "Caring for IT Security" along with Andreas Poller from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). In their paper, they argue for a caring approach on IT Security that accounts for the dispersed heterogeneous actors involved in "doing" security. They argue IT Security is more than a technological given, but both a socio-material practice and ethico-moral phenomena.



Olga Galanova: Panel-Presentation on "Stasi-Surveillance of Everyday Communication in the Private Sphere"

10-12 October 2018, Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development, Berlin
Olga Galanova opens the First Panel “Causing Fears" with the topic "Stasi-Surveillance of Everyday Communication in the Private Sphere". She presents Stasi-work as a relevant case study for the interdisciplinary analysis of an interface between fear and Technology with the focus on Technology as sourse and medium of the fear communication.
The State Security Service of the former GDR used wiretapping technology not only as a way of collecting information, but also as a method of pressure and so called "destruction". As a part of these activities, stasi paid particular attention to signs of fear by observed people in their communication. These signs were interpreted as general criteria of "anti-state activities" but also as characteristics of self-control and deconspiration. Starting with this point, the paper describes concrete actions of how the Stasi become aware of certain fear markers in overheard phone conversations. The talk is based on the proceeding paper "Angstsprache der Stasi-Unterlagen. Zur Konstitution der Bedrohlichkeit in alltäglichen und institutionellen Kontexten der DDR". In Barbara Job (u.a Hrsg.) Angstsprachen. 2018. VS Verlag.
https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/geschichte-der-gefuehle/konferenzen/workshop-the-multifaceted-relationship-between-fear-and-technology


Research Associate (50%) in Environment/Energy and Social Development/STS

We are looking for a 11-Month Research Associate (50%) (alternatively 5 1/2 Months full-time)

Qualification Profile

Research experience in

  • Environmental Studies and Social Development
  • Science & Technology Studies
  • Qualitative (particularly ethnographic) methods
  • Application for external funding in the above mentioned areas

 

English language proficiency is required and candidates with research experience in Latin America and Spanish language proficiency will be preferred.

  Work Tasks

  • Contribution to writing funding applications and to teaching in the above mentioned areas.
  • Participation in the organization and co-ordination of tasks at the Chair for Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge (e.g. organizing research colloquia and workshops, planning of teaching etc.).
  • The amount of teaching is regulated by §3 of the Lehrverpflichtungsverordnung NRW.


Application deadline: 20. August 2018 to irene.scamoni-selcan@rub.de. For inquiries, do not hesitate to contact estrid.sorensen@rub.de.
Please see the full announcement here.