Good morning to you and bye-bye 2020!

This will be our final letter this year and what a year it has been! When Heads of Lab Rachel and Marisa, announced the annual theme for 2020 to be Deep Time, little did we expect ourselves to be in this deep. Covid-19 pandemic certainly required agile planning, distributed settings and reinventing what lab life could be. 

A quick look back, the covid-19 pandemic also forced new ways of connecting. A PhD course 'Research, Interrupted' gathering more than 100 participants from around the world - all struggling with conducting research during various forms of lockdowns and restrictions. A Pandemic Diaries on pandemic thoughts, lives, realities, numbers and how it was all affecting us and the world around us. And then there were all the cancellations or re-configurations... The lab's 5-year birthday party moved online with letters in a bottle, planned visits and workshops were postponed, the Biennale with Lab of Aesthetics and Ecology, conferences cancelled along with the launch of the second edition of the GDPR Chapbook 'Common Erasures: Speaking back to GDPR'. 

It also became a year of reflection. Our local hosting of Distribute 2020 conference prepared us for the New Normal for 2020 - online participation. The syllabus The Digital Anthropocene grounded us in the computational present and its materiality. Research, Interrupted opened new avenues for research. And, Ada Lovelace Day's workshop with Vasiliki Tsaknaki raised important data visualization questions - read Vasiliki's reflections in her blog post.

We want to thank everyone in the lab for coping with the extraordinary circumstances and making lab-life happen despite restrictions and limitations. Our minds, bodies and social proximities need to recover! Invitation below for a social and fun X-mas party zooming in on creative bye-bye-2020 letters and a competition! 

Also a huge THANK YOU to the ITU organizers behind the 3-day event 'Women in Research: A Day is not enough', Lara Reime, Jessamy Perriam, Louise Harder Fischer and Helle Martens! An event that was raised to a higher level, professionally designed and woven with care for the participants. Ending the event with a talk by and with Cathrine D’Ignazio & Laura Klein, authors of Data Feminism was a brilliant practice-based inspiration that called to action for everyone at ITU. 

On a practical matter, ETHOS Lab is for the next few months running without a Lab Manager but we are expecting it to be resolved at the beginning of the year. In the meantime, please have patience.  

Stay safe and sane - and remember to subscribe. Keep us posted on social media [twitter, facebook Instagram] 

Merry X-mas and a Happy New Year! 

All the best,

ETHOS Lab 
ethos.itu.dk 
Co-heads of Lab: Marisa Cohn & Rachel Douglas-Jones
Post doc: Katrine Meldgaard Kjær
Lab Manager & Newsletter Editor: Marie Blønd