Letter from Heads of Lab

Rachel Douglas-Jones and Marisa Cohn they present our thematic emphasis for this coming year: Deep Time, a term predominantly used by astronomers and geologists to describe the vertiginous lengths of time that have preceded human presence on earth. Interested both in depth and in time, we take it as a theme to orient our work in the following ways: 

First, Deep Time playfully acknowledges the relative timescales at play in tech development: is the human a relevant scale when read against the quickened obsolescence of technology development? Second, Deep Time acknowledges that 2020 is a year beset by outdated futuristic predictions, haunted by old futures. Can ideas like layering and sedimenting help us think about the infrastructures, platforms and new systems being added to organisations in the digitizing of everyday life? Third, we want to make histories of technology more present in our everyday work in the Lab. Our annual Ada Lovelace Day brings computational history.....
Read more,,.

Training for Precarity

Blogpost by Lotte Schack, Anthropologist and intern in ETHOS Lab

For a few months, unemployed university graduates have been subject to heated debate which coincidentally started around the time I entered the unemployment system after having completed a degree, perhaps ironically with a thesis about precarious employment in Berlin. This blog post explores how the Danish unemployment system trains newly unemployed graduates to approach job searching and asks how that shapes unemployed graduates’ relationship to the labour market. As I have experience with the system myself, I conducted a mainly auto-ethnographic project (Reed-Danahay 1997; Williams 2015), complemented by a few interviews with other unemployed university graduates. Read more...

Writing Workshops

Many activities and interests in ETHOS Lab never manifests in the academic limelight as published articles. One of our autumn focus points was therefore to explore writing in a collaborative way as a lab. We explored this in a series of 3 workshops. The first was designed and facilitated by Line Henriksen and Katrine Meldgaard Kjær focusing on monsters and vulnerabilities. The second was a role-playing workshop revolving around the GDPR event and the hauntings of the mystical box of data. The third and final workshop was an exploration of particular articles that could potentially be written in collaboration and 3 intense writing sessions. One article has already been submitted and several are being outlined. 

Metro for (almost) everybody

Blogpost by Viktoriya Feshak, Junior Researcher and ETHOS Lab intern

Almost three months ago, when I came to Copenhagen for my internship at the ETHOS Lab, a long-awaited city phenomenon was introduced to the citizens: new metro line Cityringen. This project is envisioned to be “sustainable”, “stronger and more efficient”; it operates with driverless train, equipped with user-friendly devices, and overall is very aesthetic. Moreover, this is a second, improved version of an existing metro and the construction of this project started two years after Denmark had ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), where they acknowledged to promote Universal Design in architectural policies..Read more.

Methods and approaches for studying algorithmic systems

A Blogpost by Simy Kaur Gahonia on her participation in a workshop on methods and approaches for social science studies of algorithms.

The workshop was the second in a series of three with the overarching theme of Nordic perspectives on algorithmic systems, funded by NOS-HS.
Because the question is, as the organizers ask, could there be a particular and productive Nordic approach to studying algorithms and their practices? For this purpose, some 30 researchers made their way to Scrollbar at ITU, where the method-specific workshop took place; The previous workshop in the series dealt with concepts and metaphors of algorithmic systems (hosted in Stockholm), and the third is set to think up potential interventions (hosted in Helsinki).

ETHOS Lab’s Marisa Cohn and Pedro Ferreira were spearheading the organization of this second workshop at ITU. Read more.

Industrial PhD event

Are you considering an Industrial PhD? We have invited key people to the lab to tell us something about how to plan and apply. You should leave with at least an overview of the process and upcoming deadlines. You will also get the chance to hear about the endeavor from someone currently doing an industrial PhD. Everyone is welcome! 

When: 6 February from 14-15.30
Where: ETHOS Lab, 3A30