September 2022

Season of change in ETHOS

Hi there,

As you’ll be able to read from this month’s newsletter, ETHOS Lab is very much in a season of change. We’ve said goodbye to some dear colleagues, and welcomed new ones in return. As the start-of-semester-rush starts to settle this has once again prompted us to reflect on the role of the lab - for the members, for the student community, for ITU, and for the research community as a whole. I’m not sure this reflection will ever end, and I’m not sure it should either. As people (and in particular as feminists), I think it’s natural to reflect on our role within different systems. And it’s a cycle that’s bound to come around every so often.

We have plenty to report on this month, so I will keep this first rant short. For now I’ll just say this: Thanks for reading along every month. Writing this newsletter has become a pretty hyggelig monthly tradition where I get to reflect on all the things we’ve got going in the lab.

Stay happy, stay warm! 

- Henriette 

We’d always love to hear your feedback on the newsletter. Reach us here: ethos@itu.dk 

What’s new?  

Kat Jungnickel visit
Back in mid-June we had the absolute pleasure of welcoming Dr Kat Jungnickel and Ellen Fowles from the POP Lab at Goldsmiths University to ETHOS Lab. 
Dr Kat Jungnickel is the PI and Ellen Fowles is the Research Assistant and Project Manager on the ERC funded projects Politics of Patents: Reimagining Citizenship via Clothing Inventions (1820-2020). This project explores citizenship and changing socio-political issues via speculative sewing – by researching, reconstructing and re-imagining a collection of lesser-known inventions from 200 years of clothing inventions.

You can read much more about their visit through the blogpost linked below. 

Lara joins the lab
ETHOS Lab happily welcomes Lara Reime, who is a PhD Fellow in the Technologies in Practice research group. During her time at TiP Lara’s work has already intersected with the lab multiple times, and we are thrilled that she will now officially join us. 
Her interdisciplinary research project combines design and ethnographic methods to explore sociotechnical entanglements of infertile bodies, with focus on bodily and embodied practices of fertility tracking. Building on feminist theories of bodies and embodiment, her research explores critical, material and speculative approaches to self-tracking and reproduction. Her work puts forward an understanding of reproductive bodies that goes beyond the female body and encompasses interpersonal and more-than-human relations as well as experiences of male, non-binary, trans* and infertile bodies. 

For more on Lara’s own reflections on her work, click here.

Visit from the CRAI-CIS research group 
On the last day of summer, August 31st, we had the great pleasure of welcoming four researchers from Aalto University. Professor of Practice Nitin Sawhney, Dr. Minttu Tikka and PhD fellows Kaisla Kajava and Karolina Drobotowicz are all part of the CRAI-CIS (CRitical AI and Crisis Interrogatives) research group in the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University. They are all former colleagues of mine (Henriette) from my time at Aalto, and I was excited to see these two worlds collide. You can read more about the visit in the blogpost linked below.

Farewells in the lab
With the end of summer sadly also came the end of an era (at least for now). Both Adam Veng, who has been a researcher in the TiP group and a part of ETHOS for the past year, and Mace Ojala, our dear Research Assistant Technician (aka. Lab RAT) have moved on to new exciting projects. Adam has started a PhD at KU, conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork in common housing areas with a tentative interest in critically exploring ideals and practices of Danish idioms such as “fællesskab” (community) and the relationship between informal and formal “foreningsliv” (associational life). Mace has accepted a one year scientific assistant job in a project at The Ruhr University Bochum, engaging the German media theory tradition for software studies, and teaching an STS and critical data seminar. We all wish them the best of luck in their endeavours - and hope for many many visits, of course.

Writing retreat
On Friday September 23rd the lab gathered once again for a writing retreat in Christianshavn. As we’ve done before, we followed an unconference format. We ran three writing sessions throughout the day, discussing and writing together on topics such as technofeminist digital methods, digital self defense, as well as some auto-ethnographic writing.
We’re hoping to continue this tradition of a semesterly writing retreat as a way for us to get out of ITU together as a lab, to create and write together.

New Junior Researchers
We are very excited to announce that the new cohort of ETHOS Junior Researchers have now been chosen and notified. We had a record number of high quality applications this year, so this cohort will be bigger than ever before. The JRs have each proposed some highly relevant and interesting projects, and we look forward to seeing where the programme will take their research – and of course to share it with you all on the blog in coming months. 

New open hours in the lab
Please note a change in the lab's open hours: 

- Tuesdays 10:00-11:30
- Thursdays 11:00-14:00

What's next?

Ada Lovelace day 
On Tuesday October 11th we will celebrate Ada Lovelace day in the lab from 12:00-13:30. The details of the day are still under works, but if you’re interested in stopping by for the celebration, you can shoot me (Henriette) an email.

NordiCHI
ETHOS’ Solar Server experiment will be presented in NordiCHI 2022 as a critique artefact Even though the project is still taking shape, we are happy to share that Luis Landa will be presenting the inspiration, ideas, and provocations behind the project at the conference on the 12th of October. The focus points of the talk will be the challenges faced by proposing solutions that are redundant, rebound effects & material footprints, and the difficulty in dealing with the climate crisis through IT work. 
The feedback from the reviewers, as well as different discussions within the lab, have fundamentally changed the direction of the experiment. Some of the projects we are now looking into are: using the solar server as a node in tor-networks as well as hosting different static websites. 
We will keep you updated once the first changes happen – and if you have any ideas on developing for a limited computer environment, please do get in touch with us.

Reimagining Platforms symposium
Jessamy Perriam is attending the Reimagining Platforms symposium at the University of Edinburgh on the 31st of October. The symposium is looking at platforms from a range of perspectives: platform economy and labour, governance and research methods. Jessamy will be participating in a panel discussion which focuses on ethnographic and participatory methods for researching platforms.

Feminist hackathon
Something is simmering in the ETHOS Lab… We are now in the first phase of organising a feminist hackathon (to be held next spring). If this is something you would like to be part of or you would just like to hear more about — reach out to lab manager Henriette (hefh@itu.dk). 

Updates from the blog

Visit from Kat Jungnickel / POP Lab

Back in mid-June we had the absolute pleasure of welcoming Dr Kat Jungnickel and Ellen Fowles from the POP Lab at Goldsmiths University to ETHOS Lab. Dr Kat Jungnickel is the PI and Ellen Fowles is the Research Assistant and Project Manager on the ERC funded projects Politics of Patents: Reimagining Citizenship via Clothing Inventions (1820-2020). This project explores citizenship and changing …

Read more.

 Wishing you all a beautiful rest of your day!

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ETHOS Lab

www.ethos.itu.dk 

Co-heads of Lab: Marisa Cohn & Jessamy Perriam
Lab Manager: Henriette Friis