Projects
The lab research community both hosts and serve as an inspirational playground for research projects. We sometimes engage in projects together and at other times create connections beyond the lab.Feminist Technoscience in Practice
Through the Feminist Technoscience in Practice initiative, we aim to teach tangible technical skills related to feminist, DEI, and justice-oriented practices. We do this through a workshop format that combines mini-lectures with hands-on exercises. So far these workshops have focused on data visualisations, accessibility tools, and generative AI.
Computing within Limits
Since 2020, the lab has been host to a solar server. Inspired by the set-up at the Low-Tech Magazine, the solar server currently hosts the blog and serves as experimental infrastructure. By limiting the energy and forcibly adapting to the energy cycles of the environment. This limitation of energy changes the way we conceive of usual IT infrastructures such as websites or services. The server has taken on a new life in a sunny balcony, but the lab helped during the set up and is one of the stewards in maintaining ITU’s solar server. For more information you can find the server at https://solar.itu.dk and if you would like to host anything or have any questions you can contact Luis at luil@itu.dk
Text to 3D Braille Sprint
Inspired by the sprint and game jam formats, at the end of 2024 the Lab started a new series of sprints which are held during the Python Study Group sessions. The idea of the sprints is to actively engage with the different areas in which the lab has commitments such as accesibility, sustainability, etc. The inaugural sprint focused on creating an open-source application to convert Danish/English text into 3D-printable Braille, democratizing access to the Lab’s 3D printing resources and advancing ETHOS’ mission of inclusive software development.
These sprints provide a unique pedagogical environment that simulates professional software development environments, offering students and faculty opportunities to explore roles in coding, design, project management, and community engagement. Currently the sprints are on hiatus, for more information contact Luis at luil@itu.dk
Monster Writing
Erasure Poetry and the GDPR
Beginning in 2018, this project has engaged the new General Data Protection Regulation through the form of erasure poetry. Through events in Denmark and internationally, we have convened academics and publics to create erasure poems from the text of the GDPR. Selections have been published in two erasure poetry collections. The collections are available through the Lab, and have been used in training workshops around the world! For an account of the process, see here.
Moving Data, Moving People
SSH Knowledge and Business Sustainability Database
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VIRT-EU
The VIRT-EU project was a Horizon 2020 collaboration between five European research partners the London School of Economics (UK), Open Rights Group (UK), Uppsala University (SE), Politechnico di Torino (IT) and Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (DK) hosted at the IT University of Copenhagen. The project aimed to demonstrate how ethical questions can and should be addressed in the development of technology. The project outputs include tool prototypes for self-assessment and for convening conversations about ethics. ETHOS facilitated conversations between the project’s ethnographers and its network analysis scholars, hosted IoT Day with project members in 2018 and 2019.
Nordic Engineers Ethics of AI Report
Mapping a Colony
ETHOS Lab is part of a funded Europeana research project called Mapping a Colony, marking the centennial of the sale of the Danish West Indies (present day US Virgin Islands) to the United States. The project was conducted in collaboration with The Royal Library, the Uncertain Archives project, the Past’s Future project, and lead by the author Lene Asp. The objective of the Mapping a Colony project was to create an interactive map to highlight and investigate Danish colonial heritage, and ETHOS took a role in discussing the politics of mapping, creating an interactive map based on the databases, and participating in the interdisciplinary datasprint ‘Representing History Through Data‘.
Data as Relation
Data as Relation was a Velux Fonden research project hosted in the TiP group between 2017 and 2020, and focused on digitalization in the Danish State. The ETHOS Lab was a site of methods experimentation in the project, supporting conversations across the PhD projects, hosting “shut up and code” sessions, and a data sprint on Techplomacy. The focus of methodological experimentation in the project was about bringing different fieldsites together in conversation. One way in which this was done was through monster theory, creating a Bestiary of Digital Monsters, as a means of generating conversations across field-sites.
Student Surveillance Project
During the spring semester of 2021, lecturers suddenly discovered that a new risk algorithm predicting student drop-out was activated in ITU’s online learning platform; LearnIT operating through Moodle software. While the algorithm got deactivated, a student project in collaboration with ETHOS lab started, investigating the naturalisation of surveillance in learning platforms and their connection to how universities get funded.
Ethos as Data Provider
Offering the lab as a site for supervision and consulting in Digital Methods can be complicated in the messiness of reality, where we periodically receive requests to harvest and provide data from social media. We occasionally feel a sense of ambivalence, uneasiness and even resistance towards handing over datasets and leaving them in the hands of others. The project ”ETHOS as a Data Provider” attends to what kind of data ethics we find ourselves involved in by incorporating two entangled tracks. The first track concerns reflecting on and qualifying our internal process of handling these requests, and the other is to participate in the academic conversations of data ethics in practice and contribute to the field.
Returning and Resisting ”Normalcy” as a University Worker
Since we returned to our offices in Summer 2021, there has been a buzzing in the corners of the Lab. Conversations on how corona and the political handling of it has affected our work life has spread, and an insistence to fundamentally (re)think working conditions for knowledge producers given the prevailing neoliberal influence has grown. We consider this to be a reoccurring theme within the Lab community, and a project which is slowly figuring and finding its form. The process is highly valuable and perhaps this is the very project.
Making Sense of Medicinal Cannabis Debates
Making sense of medicinal cannabis debates is a 3-year research project about discourses surrounding the current Danish pilot programme for medicinal cannabis. The very introduction of medicinal cannabis is often assumed to be intrinsically linked to the digitalized media landscapes where the “public” voice has a new power to mobilize and build political pressure, which is investigated and questioned by mapping the evolution of the online debate about medicinal cannabis in Denmark. The project combines digital “issue mapping” approaches with qualitative methods and explores how critical inquiry into digital methods can qualify their use.
Nordic Approaches to Algorithmic Systems
Centered around a series of three workshops, the project entails to conceptualize a Nordic approach to critical algorithm studies. The project is a collaboration between Tampere University, Helsinki University, Stockholm University, and ITU, working towards contributing to the conversations on automation, categorization, and other key features of human-machine collaborations through a unique understanding from Nordic settings. Participants bring in a broad range of scholarly backgrounds, and further include actors from outside academia. An additional objective is the establishment of a network on the topic with a strong focus on supporting junior scholars. ETHOS contributes to foster an explorative, creative, dialogue across the disciplines and hosts the workshops in Copenhagen.
Absent Data
This project considers the ways in which silences and absences are central parts of research relying on automated data collection from social media or the internet. As these research methods have gained popularity within social science and humanities, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how we engage with digital data, and how both engagement and data are situated, messy and contingent. Based on experiences with ‘missing’ data, the project mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of the relationships we may build with missing data, and how silences haunt research practices. We reimagine absent data not as a limitation, but rather an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections.
Unexamined Data - Living with Ambivalences
Research projects often end up with data and empirical material left unexamined. Often, we hold onto these materials with the anxiety and hope that they will become useful someday. Or perhaps we do not know how best to dispose of them. In this project we have stored a black box of empirical data gathered over multiple lab events and workshops without opening it. Through this experiment we live with the ambivalences of unexamined data and consider both institutional GDPR requirements as well as the collective responsibility for its liminal status as material that requires care until its eventual use or disposal.
Technology Mediated Female Health
My project has been focused on how female health is mediated by digital technologies. The term “digital technologies” encompasses technological forms such as Female Health Technologies (FemTech), (e.g., tracking technology) and popular content-sharing apps where information on female health is shared and distributed. I am gathering data online, exploring publicly available information on FemTech, content related to female health shared online, their comment sections, as well as open-source code of FemTech applications. My goal is to bring awareness to how technology mediates something carnal and physical. In my project, FemTech evolution is being discussed in relation to data privacy issues, self-optimization and reproductive labor. However, this project is not intended to argue in favor of rejecting FemTech innovation altogether. Instead, it offers a critical reflection on the development of the field so far, taking into consideration that FemTech technology mediates the experiences of menstruating bodies – experiences heavily tied to pain and discomfort.
Analysing Emotional Language in Friends
Miranda Speyer-Larsen
The TV show Friends can be classified as nothing less than a cult classic with global popularity. This project explores how emotional language is distributed among the male and female main characters. Through computational analysis of the show’s scripts, I aim to reveal how gendered emotional patterns might reinforce societal ideas of masculinity and femininity. I want this to contribute to broader discussions in feminist technoscience around how media encodes cultural values in ways that often go unnoticed.
Facial Frontiers: A comparative case study of Facial Recognition technology in state surveillance
Anne Sofie Gammelgaard Gregersen
This research project (PhD proposal) examines the role of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) in national law enforcement and its impact on the relation between state and citizens. The proliferation of digital technologies has enabled states to track every move of its citizens (Madianou, 2019), transcending surveillance beyond public spaces (Olwig et al., 2019). Globally, surveillance is assessed as a ‘growing market’ and one with more future corporate involvement, prioritizing profit-making rather than safeguarding privacy rights (UN, 2023). This evolving landscape underscores the urgency of critically examining the societal effects of FRT. RQ1: What is the scope of law enforcement’s FRT usage in the U.S and Denmark and how does it invoke citizens’ privacy rights? RQ2: What are the dominant narratives attached to FRT’s capacity and how does it shape its policies? Addressing these research questions, the project examines FRT’s role in exacerbating power dynamics between state authorities and citizens (Murray et al., 2024). Deploying ethnography in two sites, representing different stages of FRT implementation, allows the project to investigate direct and indirect effects, contributing to a broader debate on whether FRT initiatives, typically driven by security, can paradoxically lead to insecurity.
The Web Revival
Hannah Stokes
With motherhood “around the corner” and with a strong desire to leave profit-driven platforms, it has become clear that it is time to take a stance when it comes to digital childhood. Even digital play spaces for children have gone from looking like sandboxes to resembling cubicles. Therefore, this research project focuses on the potential of the Web Revival when it comes to finding ways to facilitate play online – play free from exploitation.
The Web Revival is an online cultural movement composed of assemblages of personal websites. The web developers of this part of the internet passionately evoke forgotten worlds and envision new ones. So, in order to capture this spirit, this project will be guided by critical, yet romantic people, including art theorists, activists and my own siblings.
The Liminal Play Compass: Mapping Play Values through Story-Driven Choice
David Alexander Lenarth Wright-Spaner
This project re-imagines player-type research as a narrative quiz that guides participants through an atmospheric, choice-driven journey to reveal play-style archetypes grounded in lived experiences and underrepresented perspectives, particularly those of women. Built on qualitative insights from numerous interviews and informed by, yet deliberately extending, Quantic Foundry’s Motivation Model and Gamer Types Framework, the quiz reframes player typologies as immersive self-discoveries to inspire more inclusive designs of play and interactivity.
Whose Open Science? Feminist Reflections on Policy, Infrastructure, and Inclusion
Rebecca Busk
This project began with the provocation that “Open Science will be feminist, or it won’t be at all” (Martínez Samper, 2023). Taking this statement as a point of departure, it examines how feminist epistemologies—and the values of equity, inclusion, and knowledge justice they often advance—are embedded, reinterpreted, or sidelined within Open Science policies and infrastructures. Engaging with expert blog posts, interdisciplinary academic texts, and normative documents that attempt to universalise Open Science values globally, the project reflects on the concept of situated openness to challenge universalist narratives. It asks: How might infrastructures for Open Science in higher education reflect and reproduce global hierarchies—even as they claim to leave no one behind?
Returning to its starting point, it critically considers how the label feminist is mobilized in the context of Open Science—and whether it risks narrowing broader calls for epistemic justice and decolonial critique into familiar policy frames of gender equality. The project continues to explore the politics of openness and inclusion in emerging digital Open Science futures within higher education.
A post-qualitative approach to inquiry
Réka Sára Mezei
And so, [you] began to put those post concepts… to work with whatever you were curious about… You just do that and see where that takes you… It can’t be described in advance, and it is hard to describe after you have done it. Whatever it is. Because there is no beginning and end. (Elizabeth St. Pierre, lecture recording, 2013)
Throughout the JR Programme I led a post-qualitative approach to inquiry; consequently, my project began challenging the perceived fixity of meaning, and with it what a right approach to research is, and practiced a theory-led scratching of terms I accepted as stable and objectively good. Engaging with theory, I turned towards terms I placed on a binary before and started to reorient my understanding of them and grasp their contingent character. These are, among others, “social justice,” “democracy,” and “futurity,” but also “illiberalism.” In the deconstruction of these terms, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Lee Edelman, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau were my challenge/support.
How online sub-cultures evolve into political currency
Ida Marie Ivesen and Jonas Lykou Lund
On July 22, 2024, global pop icon Charli XCX posted “kamala IS brat,” endorsing US presidential candidate Kamala Harris. This symbolized a broader shift in political campaigning, highlighting the growing importance of cultural capital, vibes, and internet subcultures over traditional political discourse. Similar phenomena were observed in Denmark, where political figures, notably Pia Kjærsgaard from Dansk Folkeparti, utilized memes and internet slang to communicate engaging political messages, signaling an international shift toward vibe-based politics.
Inspired by these cases, our research project aims to explore how online sub-cultures evolve into political currency. Through scraping, we investigate how internet language, slang, aesthetics, and subcultural expressions are associated with politics. Through data scraping and visualization, we seek to uncover how digital “vibes” influence voter behavior and reshape political discourse. Inspired by Anton Jäger’s ‘Hyper Politics’ (2023) describing political engagement through symbolics and aesthetics, we argue that vibes function as a blend of cultural and social capital, reinforcing community identities and political affiliations.
Our analysis centers on two distinct cases:
1. “Brat” and Subcultural Linguistics
2. Ballroom Culture Terms (“Slay” and “Voguing”)
Transphobia on X and How This Affects the Mental Health of Transgender People
Viktoria Liv Nielsen
In the past few years, transphobia has seemingly been on the rise. Especially on the platform X, formerly known as twitter, TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) rhetoric appears to permeate queer discourse. However, how does this affect the mental health of those who identify as transgender?
After having spent last semester analysing what themes permeate the transphobic discourse on X, I now am more sure of how to approach the secondary part of my problem statement. To find out how the transphobia on X affects the mental health of transgender people, I will host a workshop and a focus group. These will attempt to shine a light on the experiences of transgender people, and let them have a conversation about how this may have affected them.
After the two meetings, I hope to have collected data in the shape of transcripted meetings as well as the completed activities. I will analyze the data in whichever way seems to make the most sense when I have it, however, transcriptions will most likely be analyzed systematically.