June 2021

Landing in June

There are more people walking in the streets these days. We are some of them; strolling on the pavements and doing picnics in parks. The warm weather invites us to go outside and enable outdoor gatherings, which have been hindered for so long.

Our own lab orchid is thriving, currently cohabitating with the big Monstera, sharing the same soil and sun.

In the midst of these joys, we, however, hear stories of what the land is covering up. A mass grave of 215 Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc children were found close by the former Kamloops Indian Residential School run by the Catholic church in Canada. Here indigenous children were forcefully separated from their parents in an attempt to “westernise” them, and many suffered great abuse. These attempts to separate and “westernise”  resonates with how the Sami’s were treated in Sweden, how the Greenlandic children were treated by the Danish state, and it shows up in the inequality of today.

In 2019, ETHOS Lab hosted a research project Mapping a Colony, and it seems to be a suiting time to revisit that. The gorgeous buildings we admire on our strolls, often have grim histories. Repression and enslavement have ever so often been the very driver of such wealth accumulation necessarily to pay for carvings, sculptures and balconies. 

Stories of resistances are important, so the next time you walk by Kastellet (given that you move around in Copenhagen once in a while), walk further to Toldboldgade by Danish West Indian Warehouse to experience "I am Queen Mary" statue and learn it's story. 

Buried, then dug up, and soon-to-burned, the corona-infected minks already have a long post-death history. ETHOS researcher Post.doc Line Henriksen has recently published a short piece on the minkfarm mess-up in Denmark and how this haunt us.

On the surface of the earth by Christiansborg, the Syrian sit-in is now on its 5th week. They are demonstrating the Danish Government's decision to withdraw (some) Syrian refugees' permit to stay on Danish land. We recommend you walking by, maybe staying, and learn more about their struggle 

Feel free to reach out to us, if you have a mapping project in mind. We are currently reflecting about how to engage and intervene through maps.
Keep up to date with the lab by subscribing to the newsletter and follow us on twitter, facebook or Instagram.

All the best for your Junes,

ETHOS Lab
www.ethos.itu.dk 
Co-heads of Lab: Marisa Cohn & Rachel Douglas-Jones
Lab Manager: Merethe Riggelsen Gjørding

Creating Connections Between Master and PhD Students

ETHOS Lab will be focusing on creating space for master and PhD students to interact. Our lab space serves as a wonderful opportunity for casual meetings, but we also wanna create ways of purposely engaging. Right now we are puzzling over how to host a creative method course in the lab, where both PhDs and MSc students can partake. This is very exciting, and we will keep you up to date with the progress.

To get going with this work, former ETHOS Lab Manager now Post.doc Michael Hockenhull and Lab TA Casper Frohn is taking lead. Michael has always thought that student-oriented community was a crucial part of ETHOS Lab, and is happy to be supporting that once more. Casper has since autumn last year been a Junior Researcher in the lab. Based on his experiences with engaging in this open-minded and curious community, he wants to help give others similar opportunities for constructive interactions with peers.

Shout Out To...

...  Allison B. Powell and the publication of her book Undoing Optimization - Civic Action in Smart Cities. The current use of technology and surveillance creates new struggles, and invites for other ways of showing resistance. In this book, Powell argus that the de facto forms of citizenship that emerge in relation to these technologies represent sites of contention over how governance and civic power should operate.
We congratulate her on the publication and recommend all interested to read this important piece!

... Mathieu Jacomy on his PhD Sitating Visual Network Analysis. The thesis were well-received with the words of: "it enriches the work [digital methods] by adding a new level of reflection, as well as strategically attempts to tinger the network analysis", which were read out loud at the defence. 
Congratulations on the success of this research!

... Co-Head of Lab Rachel Douglas-Jones, her co-editors Antonia Walford and Nick Seaver and all the contributors on the publication of their special issue Towards an Anthropology of Data, The issue is "putting forward a case for why anthropological engagements with the data moment might be not only politically important but also conceptually generative". 
We are so happy that this is out, and hope you will give it a read.

PhD & Job Calls

Postdoc in the use of predictive algorithms in public administration at Aarhus University. The research group of the ADD project studies the Danish public administration’s development and use of predictive algorithms, with a special interest in the relationship between ensuing data-ethical controversies and public administration responses to these.The postdoc will work in close collaboration with the project team at DPU, consisting of co-PI Helene Friis Ratner, two postdocs and one PhD student, as well as with other participants in the ADD project. Deadline: 1st of August

Postdoc:  HealthXCross “Remaking Health in a Microbial Planet by Crossing Space, Time, Species and Epistemic Cultures” at Università Ca’ Foscari. The postdoc focus on one selected platform with a One Health approach in partnership with an important technological hub for the aggregation of data. She/he will analyse, within the ‘One/planetary health’ theoretical debate, the interplay between ‘data governance’ of open-data and ‘data epistemology’. Deadline: 28th of June

2 Postdoc for the Moving Data Moving People project at IT University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University. The postdocs will be key contributors to our program of research into the Social Credit System in China, carrying out independent research and working closely with the project team. This research is expected to advance anthropological studies of state digitalization projects worldwide, develop a culturally specific understanding of the notion of digitalized trust, and renew the literature on internal migration in China. Deadline: 1st of August.