Publications

The ETHOS PIE is a pedagogic tool that aims to make clearer what “the ETHOS way”/curriculum/shared knowledge base really is. It is first and foremost designed as a tool for students in the lab, but we believe it can serve as a resource for students and researchers alike in other universities too. This document emerged from discussions about the interdisciplinary nature of the lab’s work. We were particularly motivated by the needs of students who join our extracurricular Junior Researcher Program. These students are matriculated in diverse degree programs at ITU with varied curricula and thus enter the lab with different vocabularies and ways of conducting research. While our aim was never to create one unifying curriculum for all students, we wanted to articulate what we see as the essential readings that support the lab’s critical pedagogical approach and to offer a supplementary curriculum as a source of inspiration and ideation to our students.

Abstract: Whilst STS has long studied lab work, the past few years have also seen the introduction of labs as social formations for doing STS enquiry. But what kind of contributions to pedagogy, particularly in technical universities, can STS inspired university labs make? We respond to the need to more deeply understand how teaching may be practiced as a site of STS experimentation by describing the work of the ETHOS Lab, our critical feminist lab at the IT University of Copenhagen, as ‘enlivening’. Using three events from 2017–2020 as case studies, we identify both the use of space and shaping of time as integral to how we have sought to trouble knowledge production in our own environment, particularly by creating sites and situations where teaching and research cannot be separated. By showing how our Lab activities intervene in ways of knowing and doing within university hierarchies and cultures, we aim to contribute an analysis of the critical potential of STS lab work in technical environments, and recommendations from our situated evolving space of feminist praxis within an interdisciplinary IT University.

Abstract: Digital methods, taken up in the collection and analysis of data, raise concerns around extraction, representation, care, consent, and participation familiar to feminist methodologies. At a feminist STS lab, specialising in digital methods, we convened some workshops to support research design in ongoing projects situated in the Lab’s community, with the aim to articulate feminist principles for digital methods. These projects, working with methods including digital ethnography, database implementation, and machine learning design raise feminist questions around centring care in data collection and participation, navigating hesitancies around extracting data from vulnerable subjects, and working through representational politics of data. These workshops, rather than congealing a set of feminist principles, generated a proliferation of disconcertments and troubles. We offer workshopping troubles as a way to navigate and theorise tensions in designing digital methods research. We account for how these workshops served as a method to elicit troubles, surfacing them for further analysis, and helped us shift from binding dichotomies to troubles that open ongoing inquiry. We reflect on how digital methods return us to troubles that, while well understood in feminist approaches to data, require articulation in practice and research design.

Code poetry is a form of experimental writing and coding. Both writing and coding pay attention to the poetics of syntax, grammar, and punctuations, considering natural and computer languages as playful and aesthetic materials. This mix of languages is called “codework”, a genre coined by poet-theorist Alan Sondeim which he describes as “the computer stirring into the text, and the text stirring the computer”. Though textuality is an important element in language that contains meaning yet it requires interpretation, I want to point to the aspect of performativity in computer code and natural languages. One might draw upon John Langshaw Austin’s Speech-Act theory in thinking about the things that you can do with performative speech, in which the utterance of words carries inherent actions beyond simply making statements. However, code execution is different from the speech-act, because computer code, especially high-level programming language, is written for both humans and machines. When a piece of source code is executed, the computer is doing something immediately, for example, the translation of high-level code to binary code, or to display certain visual and textual materials on a web page. In this way, there are different kinds of readers beyond the human.

Abstract: On the eve of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect we, a university laboratory, marked the occasion with an interactive installation called Compliance. Data traces from Compliance were subsequently processed by the lab, here enacted in the form of a play. While much discussion has centered around modern ‘black-boxed’ processing of data, less attention has been paid to the value of the data itself, and whether it merits use. We draw on dramaturgical methods for both analysis and presentation [15], allowing for readers to imagine staging their own, different, versions of the event. Drawing on the ambiguous ontological status of (yet unexamined) data, we offer a discussion on the value of data, its use and non-use, as well as how to live with this ambivalence, continuously negotiating social contracts about our further conduct with the data.

How do researchers bring research integrity to life? This was the question that the authors of this booklet, pursued between 2017 and 2019. Following the publication of the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity in 2014, the Danish Ministry for Education funded three projects to investigate how the Code is operating in practice. This booklet arises from the ethnographic results of one of these projects, Practicing Integrity