The Responsible Mobility Governance & Innovation (ReMGo) project pursues an approach that anticipates, evaluates, and addresses potential impacts, societal expectations, and ethical issues relating to research and technology, especially concerning recommendations for action and questions of governance in and outside the Munich Cluster for the Future of Mobility in Metropolitan Regions (MCube). This project is accompanying and integrative to the innovation projects in the cluster and therefore aims at a close exchange with as many actors from science, business, the city, and civil society as possible in the consortium. In the course of this, ReMGo analyzes and reflects political, social, and regulatory aspects in technology, product, and cluster development in specific MCube subprojects as well as across project boundaries.

People (working on the project at the STS Department): Dr. Alexander Wentland, Sophia Knopf

Project leader(s): Dr. Alexander Wentland

Period: 11.2021-11.2023

Project type: Consortium Project

Funding institution: BMBF

Due to heavy investments from governments and private stakeholders, quantum computing technologies have recently entered a level of public awareness and policy attention. This necessitates thorough investigation of the technology’s further development. Our group studies how quantum computing technologies are developed in laboratories, how eco-systems emerge around the purpose of quantum computing innovation and how the topic is received and reacted upon in the public sphere.

People (working on the project at the STS Department):  Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Dr. Joakim Juhl, Jasmin Shokoui, M.A.,Cecília Peres, M.Sc.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Period: 11.2022-11.2025

Funding institution: GoTransTech TUM Innovation Network

The Munich Cluster for the Future of Mobility in Metropolitan Regions (MCube) aims to use the Munich region unique, with its unique geographical concentration of innovation actors in the mobility sector, as a “learning region” to develop scalable solutions for metropolitan regions in Germany and worldwide. We are committed to sustainable, efficient and socially just mobility, with the aim of realizing leap innovations with great economic impact and high solution potential for global challenges.

Project leader(s): Dr. Alexander Wentland

Period:11.2021-11.2024

Project type: Consortium Project

Funding institution: BMBF

The project zooms in on different ways the prevalent “innovation imperative” for regions (Pfotenhauer et al., 2018) and related forces of globalization are being brought into alignment with local identities, culture, history, and politics. The sub-project Cultivating Creativity in Urban Development Projects investigates creative districts as spaces where local understandings of worthwhile innovations are negotiated. Through these different lenses, Understanding Regional Innovation Cultures 2.0 at its core examines development strategies employed to build desirable futures for their citizens in the face of policy expectations to connect these futures to innovation.

“Lost” regions of Innovation

This project explores “lost” regions of innovation, or places shaped by industrial decline, political polarization, and growing disillusionment about the promises of innovation to deliver growth and better living for all citizens. Lost regions are facing mounting pressures to revitalize and redevelop, with the expectation from policymakers that their transformation be linked to innovation. The microchip industry has recently been framed as a high-tech solution to post-industrial places, especially through the US CHIPs and Science Act, a policy that promises to bring semiconductor manufacturing “back” to America and redevelop rustbelt regions through providing jobs, national relevance, and essentially, a future. More specifically, through case studies in Upstate New York (USA), Columbus, Ohio (USA), Leuven (Belgium), and Dresden (Germany), this project examines how innovation is imagined as well as how semiconductor policy is taken up in both rustbelt regions and regions they are trying to emulate. The cases examine how desirable futures are constructed, how they tie into innovation, and how this innovation imaginary travels through different socio-cultural-political landscapes.

“Hidden” regions of Innovation

The research project Hidden Regions: Exploring Innovation in the Periphery examines how regions outside the well-known metropolitan regions and innovation centers are dealing with the pressure to position themselves as innovation leaders and how their future is increasingly linked to their perceived innovation and competitiveness in the eyes of policy makers. A focus here is on economically strong medium-sized urban areas with relative prosperity, characterized by Hidden Champion industries as well as solid social and institutional cohesion. In particular, the project explores how global innovation dynamics shape and are shaped by cultural, socioeconomic, historical, and political contexts at the local level. Within the first project phase, this question is investigated in the context of the region Heilbronn-Franconia. For this purpose, central actors from the fields of economics, research, education, administration, and politics are interviewed to analyze their perspectives on regional innovation cultures. In the second phase of the project, these results are used for a comparison with Ostwestfalen-Lippe and Emilia-Romagna. The results of the study are intended to illustrate the local embeddedness of innovation dynamics to highlight the importance of regional specificities at the crossroad with governed processes of urban transformation.

Cultivating Creativity in Urban Development Projects

Creative districts or cultural districts have become a governmental strategy for battling with local challenges – be it imagining a more ecological and socially equitable urban infrastructure or an economic revival – creativity has become a staple for urban development. Here, Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative class” (2011) still shapes current hopes to synergistically bring together technological innovation, start-ups scenes and a more grounded scene, routed in subculture, arts, and protest movements. Against the background of supra-national developments such as the Green New Deal and the New European Bauhaus Movement, creative districts have become a popular approach to imagine more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable urban futures, whereby respective understandings of worthwhile innovations and social order are (spatially) negotiated. Through extensive case studies on creative districts and creativity-based development strategies in Munich (Germany) and Bristol (UK), the project investigates the local-specific approaches to creativity-based urban transformation: How does the respective state-logic correlate with said approaches? Who is (not) part of the “creative scenes”, and which ideas of creativity, (sub-)culture, and innovation are circulating here? And what does this mean for the respective future of the city?

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Project type: Third-party funded Project

Funding institution:DFG

What makes expert knowledge credible, legitimate, and reliable for use in public policy? Together with colleagues from TUM and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Prof. Sebastian Pfotenhauer analyzed Germany’s political pandemic response as part of a larger comparative study organized by Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia universities and funded by the National Science Foundation and Schmidt Futures.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Period: 01.03.2020-31.12.2023

Funding institution: National Science Foundation, Schmidt Futures

How can citizens shape the development of healthy and sustainable food, and what role should technology play in this process? What methods can engage publics on diverse issues across food, health and sustainability? How do innovation practices promote or prevent the democratization of food systems and address what are seen as major challenges?

Vertical farming is a technologically-enhanced approach to horticulture that has been widely invested with promises and predictions of producing healthy and sustainable food in close proximity to where people live. New technologies often invoke societal concerns, and vertical farming is no exception having been the subject of divergent claims and criticisms.

This project aims to gain a better understanding of hopes and uncertainties around vertical farming among producers, consumers, scientists, civil society groups and wider publics. It will do so by developing a Citizen Participation Forum (CPF) assessing the potential of vertical farming technologies to address some of the major challenges current food systems face. Combining a range of participation methods including online issue mapping, face-to-face dialogue and hands-on ‘makerthons,’ the CPF aims to stimulate broad public engagement with vertical farming technologies and practices.

“Cultivating Engagement” is a research-driven project that involves collaboration between university, industry and NPO partners, and is funded through EIT Food, the newest EIT – KIC (European Institute of Innovation and Technology – Knowledge and Innovation Community). Besides contributing to scholarship on public engagement in (food & agricultural) science and technology, findings will inform business partners and scientists in other EIT Food projects to critically engage in creating, implementing, and learning from public engagement schemes.

Project results :

• Waller, L. & M. Gugganig (2021). Re-visioning public engagement with emerging technology: A digital methods experiment on ‘vertical farming.’ Public Understanding of Science.
• Deliverable Report 7: Analysis and Outcome of the Project: DEL07(1)
• Deliverable 4, Part 1: Comparative study on citizen engagement with vertical farming between Munich and London: DEL04 Part 1
• Interview TUM Faszination Forschung – “Vertical farming is a child of the Silicon Valley high-tech world”

Partner

• PlantLab
• EUFIC
• KU Leuven

Project leader(s): Dr. Mascha Gugganig

Period: 09.2017 - 12.2018

Project type: ["Verbundprojekt \/ Consortium Project"]

Funding institution: EIT Food

This project aims to explore how transnational European research infrastructures have been both a vehicle for, and the beneficiaries of, European integration project. By studying how different generations of European research infrastructures embody different visions and models for European integration, we demonstrate how trans-national science and trans-national European sociopolitical orders have been co-produced with one another.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. S. Pfotenhauer

Period: 01.01.2019 – 01.06.2023

Project type: ["Drittmittelprojekt \/ Third-party funded Project"]

Funding institution: DFG

A comparison of five German urban regions and their adoption of best practice models of innovation

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What is the study about?

The project aims to place questions of local cultures, identities, and social needs at the center of innovation theory. A three-year comparative analysis of five different German urban regions – Berlin, Dortmund, Dresden, Karlsruhe and Munich, – explores how these regions navigate the tensions between abstract models of innovation and local socio-cultural embeddedness. This study aims to understand how each region demonstrates the purpose, mechanics, and limits of innovation differently.

All five city-regions stand out for their strong technical universities and recent initiatives to promote science and technology. Yet, beyond the usual indicators of innovativeness, we seek to understand sociologically how each city-region takes a distinct path to situate itself, along with its changing economy, history, and cultural diversity, in the “innovation society.”

As a result of the project, the concept of regional cultures of innovation will be developed, allowing local differences to be better reflected and accounted for in both innovation theory and public policy.

Why is this topic important?

It is virtually impossible to talk about economic development or societal progress without explicitly or implicitly addressing the need for innovation. Innovation is presented as an important driver of competitiveness and long-term prosperity. It is seen as an essential prerequisite for a better future and a solution to new and persistent challenges – whether in health, demographic change, sustainability, food, poverty, inequality, education, or transportation – almost regardless of where or what the specific challenges are.

Yet more than ever, rifts are also opening up when it comes to shaping innovation and the distribution of its benefits. Although innovation policy has become increasingly scientified and institutionalized, promises by science and technology initiatives to actually boost regions and cities nevertheless regularly fail. The geography of Germany’s declared high-tech hubs remains uneven, dominated by a select few research-rich and affluent urban region.

Popular models of successful innovation, such as the formation of clusters in the sense of Silicon Valley or the coupling of technical universities with the start-up scene, analogous to the U.S. MIT model, and the plans to reproduce this in new places, are reaching their limits in many places.

In connection with this, the innovation research itself also faces many unresolved questions: how can local, social, and cultural factors be seriously incorporated into theory building? How can social science research on innovation help policymakers as well as the public shape innovation initiatives in culturally appropriate and socially robust ways?

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. S. Pfotenhauer, Dr. A. Wentland

Period: 04.2018 – 04.2021

Project type: ["Drittmittelprojekt \/ Third-party funded Project"]

Funding institution: DFG

“Digitization… what?” Often this is the first reaction of farmers who practice regenerative or biodiverse farming when asked whether they use digital technologies on their farm. GPS-controlled tractors, drones, or the Internet of Things are rarely a lived reality. For others the question may arise in daily work how certain tasks could be simplified.

This subproject explores the possibilities and limits of digitization in small and medium-sized regenerative / biodiverse farming. It poses whether digital technologies with its premise of standardization and automation are fundamentally opposed to biodiverse farming approaches. Are digital technologies fundamentally useless because standardization and automation are not compatible with biodiverse approaches, and if so, how? Which digital technologies and tools already exist for small-scale and/or biodiverse farming, and which ones are still in need of development? Isn’t the cell phone in the farming field also a digital tool? And what about the ownership, protection and monitoring of data collected from these forms of agriculture?

Together with Dr. Sarah Hackfort and her research team at the Department of Agricultural and Food Policy at Humboldt University, and in relation to our Canadian sister project “Diversity by Design,” we explore these questions through an online survey, and a participatory workshop with farmers, and representatives from technology development, design, and policy. Among others, the aim is to develop policy recommendations to strengthen smallholder farms and their specific needs.

Impressions of the workshop “Biodiverse agriculture and digitalization – between contradictions and synergies”

 On October 14, 2023, we came together in the beautiful spaxes of ZIRKA, the Center for Interdisciplinary Spatial and Cultural Work, in Munich for a participatory workshop with practitioners from agriculture and gardening across Germany. The focus of the participatory design workshop was on whether, how and which synergies and contradictions exist between biodiverse agriculture and digitalization for small/medium-scale, regenerative and (agro)organic farms.

The 12 participants were invited to approach this topic by formulating visions of the future of agriculture and by using the speculative design approach. In order to better define the areas of work, as workshop team we expanded upon the graphic by Prause and Egger (2023) as a guide, and a selection of working areas formed the basis of the small group work (administration, direct marketing, knowledge transfer and everyday topics; Fig. 1.).[1]

In the first round, the four groups started off by create a mind map to reflect on what solutions are needed for sustainable agriculture. In the second step, the mind map was expanded to include the role of digitalization as part of possible solutions. This was an important sequence, as problems were defined first, and only then the role of digital technologies, which were understood as possible part of the solutions (Fig. 2.).

The next task was then more practical: based on their mind maps, the small groups were asked to specify what innovation would be needed in their specific farm work in 2035 to subsequently design it in a speculative way. Speculative design is a participatory method in which design is understood not (only) as a classically designed solution but as a critique of current realities of life. Here, ‘innovation’ becomes a provocation, and design functions not so much for production but for social debate.[2] In this practical activity, workshop participants therefore designed innovations that also functioned as a critique of prevailing knowledge, administrative, work and social structures in contemporary agriculture.

For example, one group that dealt with administration developed a so-called ‘data pool’ that would be owned by farmers and thus included not only agricultural data but also the very data infrastructure (Fig. 3.). Another group (on direct marketing) envisioned a rural community in which local politicians bear greater responsibility for providing public spaces for direct marketing, and with it, more opportunities for networking and consumer education (Fig. 4.).

Consumer education was also the focus of the third group on knowledge transfer, whose participants here saw an important role for digital information and communication technologies (Fig. 5.). The last group (daily themes and issues) was then dedicated to digital technologies for small-scale agroforestry systems, analysis and automation (e.g., drones), in which, crucially, humans always remain at the center as developers and controllers (Fig. 6.).

The workshop was a great success that was in large part due to the active engagement of the participants (and the sufficient amount of good food!), and we thank everyone for their time! We take away important insights for another workshop in Northern Germany soon, and look forward to presenting the analyzed data soon.

[1] Prause, L. und A. Egger (2023). “Digitalisation for a socio-ecological transformation in Agriculture.” In Jankowski, P., Höfner, A., Hoffmann, M. L., Rohde, F., Rehak, R. & Graf, J. (Eds.). Shaping Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society. Contributions from Bits & Bäume, 104-109. Along their technology criteria we defined 1) planning, 2) administration, 3) direct marketing, 4) consultancy/recommendatioins for farming praxis, 5) daily themes and issues, 6) excessive production, and 7) knowledge dissemination.

[2] Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming (2013, MIT Press); Carl DiSalvo Design as democratic inquiry: putting experimental civics into practice (2022, MIT Press).

Project leader(s): Dr. Mascha Gugganig

Funding institution: DFG

How can citizens shape the development of healthy and sustainable food, and what role should technology play in this process? What methods can engage publics on diverse issues across food, health and sustainability? How do innovation practices promote or prevent the democratization of food systems and address what are seen as major challenges?

Vertical farming is a technologically-enhanced approach to horticulture that has been widely invested with promises and predictions of producing healthy and sustainable food in close proximity to where people live. New technologies often invoke societal concerns, and vertical farming is no exception having been the subject of divergent claims and criticisms.

This project aims to gain a better understanding of hopes and uncertainties around vertical farming among producers, consumers, scientists, civil society groups and wider publics. It will do so by developing a Citizen Participation Forum (CPF) assessing the potential of vertical farming technologies to address some of the major challenges current food systems face. Combining a range of participation methods including online issue mapping, face-to-face dialogue and hands-on ‘makerthons,’ the CPF aims to stimulate broad public engagement with vertical farming technologies and practices.

“Cultivating Engagement” is a research-driven project that involves collaboration between university, industry and NPO partners, and is funded through EIT Food, the newest EIT – KIC (European Institute of Innovation and Technology – Knowledge and Innovation Community). Besides contributing to scholarship on public engagement in (food & agricultural) science and technology, findings will inform business partners and scientists in other EIT Food projects to critically engage in creating, implementing, and learning from public engagement schemes.

Project results :

• Waller, L. & M. Gugganig (2021). Re-visioning public engagement with emerging technology: A digital methods experiment on ‘vertical farming.’ Public Understanding of Science.
• Deliverable Report 7: Analysis and Outcome of the Project: DEL07(1)
• Deliverable 4, Part 1: Comparative study on citizen engagement with vertical farming between Munich and London: DEL04 Part 1
• Interview TUM Faszination Forschung – “Vertical farming is a child of the Silicon Valley high-tech world”

Partner

• PlantLab
• EUFIC
• KU Leuven

Project leader(s): Dr. Mascha Gugganig

Period: 09.2017 - 12.2018

Project type: ["Verbundprojekt \/ Consortium Project"]

Funding institution: EIT Food

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Are we facing a constitutional crisis? As stem cell research redefines the meaning of life, big data systems subvert expectations of privacy, and nudge economics takes on the role of governments and regulation, science and technology (S&T) play an increasingly profound role in ordering our world. In doing so, they are not only ‘constitutive’ of life in contemporary societies, but indeed ‘constitutional’ – challenging both the existing social orders enshrined in our legal and political institutions and what comes to be regarded as desirable orders in the first place. This poses a number of critical questions at the intersection of science & technology studies (MCTS), law, and public policy: how to think about the constitutional foundations of society in view of recent trends in S&T? What are the implications of these arrangements for understanding rights, responsibilities, subjectivity, government, and regulation? Are conventional approaches to law and democratic governance sufficient to address the challenges of constitutions in a technoscientific world?

This German-American research exchange centered around a joint symposium in Washington DC will explore how science and technology (re-constitute) society through the lens of „technoscientific constitutionalism.“ We build on recent work across a number of domains, including bio-constitutionalism, infrastructure politics, and critical legal studies. As S&T frequently cut to the heart of social, political and legal categories, we propose to study these transformations and their consequences in three paradigmatic domains: biosciences, information technology and economics. Using thus a two-fold comparative approach (across domains and with participants from two countries), the conference will focus allow us to identify salient differences and cultural idiosyncrasies in technoscientific constitutions. We also want to find out how we must change our theories and methods in order to analyze the technoscientific constitutions of contemporary society.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. S. Pfotenhauer (TUM), Prof. Dr. Ben Hurlbut (ASU), Prof. Christopher Kelty (UCLA), Prof. Dr. Sabine Maasen (TUM), Prof. Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan), PD Dr. Jan-Hendrik Passoth (TUM), Prof. Malte Ziewitz (Cornell University)

Period: 10/2017 - 07/2029

Project type: Array

Funding institution: DFG - NSF

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Period:

Project type: Array

At TUM, Akanksha’s PhD research focuses on how the function and role of ‘Rule of Law’ can influence, intervene and guide in setting design goals, choices, and standardizations to configure Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) at different layers, keeping in mind its relation with humans and society and how it would impact the historical and social dimension of Rule of Law ecosystem. She employs a theoretical as well as socio-techno-legal approaches to explore the co-existence of DLT (Lex cryptographia ecosystem) and Rule of Law ecosystem and investigate the possibilities of shaping a harmonious Rule of Law-driven development and deployment of DLT. The idea is not merely to set up legal or ethical boundaries for regulatory purpose but to explore an enabling legal framework within which the DLT can thrive as a public good.

Project leader(s): Akanksha Bisoyi

Project type: PhD Project

Today, data protection law has become an important and indispensable prerequisite for activities in organizations. The aim of the project is to train students and researchers at TUM in the confident and socially responsible use of data, by creating a comprehensive asynchronous online course in English, that provides essential legal knowledge on important aspects of data governance. It is not only about data protection, but also about sharing, publishing and making data accessible and the associated handling. In addition to learning about the basic structures of these dynamic regulatory issues, course participants will become familiar with problems they encounter in their daily work. Questions of research data management will be a common thread running through the course. Furthermore, the course contributes to general legal literacy and brings participants closer to the ideal of being able to independently realize Human-Centered Engineering.

Project leader(s): Akanksha Bisoy

Dieses Projekt untersucht Fragen des Schutzes der Rechtsstaatlichkeit und der „Rule of Law“ im Zuge der Schaffung, Umsetzung und Aufrechterhaltung von COVID-19 Kontrolltechnologien.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Christian Djeffal, Prof. Dr. Mark Findlay

Period: 01.09.2020 – 01.09.2021

 Funding institution: Institute for Ethics in Aritifical Intelligence (IEAI) TUM

Themes: COVID-19; Rule Of Law; Law by design; Critical Design; Privacy Preservation; Contact Tracing, Control Technologies

The project addresses the goal of privacy-preserving contact tracing, particularly in work environments from a technical perspective including law by design and critical design approaches.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Gerog Carle, Prof. Dr. Marc-Oliver Pahl

Period: 01.09.2020 – 01.06.2021

Funding institution: Deutsch-Französische Akademie für die Industrie der Zukunft

Themes: COVID-19; QRONITON; Law by design; Critical Design; Privacy Preservation; Contact Tracing

The project Coding Public Value focuses on the development and evaluation of methods for responsible software engineering for the common good and corresponding institutional, political and organizational frameworks for public-service media platforms. How can legal, political and user-oriented requirements of public media be translated into requirements, methods and quality assessment practices for the engineering of software and which institutional, political, and organizational requirements have to be implemented in order to operate public service media platforms on the foundation of such public service-oriented software engineering? The project combines Science & Technology Studies, Media and Communication Research, Legal Studies, and empirical Software Engineering in an interdisciplinary collaboration.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Christian Djeffal, PD Dr. Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Daniel Mendez, Prof. Dr. Hans-Bernd Brosius, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz

Period: 01.01.2020 - 31.03.2023

Project type: Third-party funded Project

Funding institution: bidt

This project investigates changing evidence practices for technical safety in Germany during a key period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Whereas the first project phase focused mainly on the two technological domains of nuclear and automotive technology, the second phase will concentrate on the emergence of what we call the risk industry.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Karin Zachmann, Dr. Stefan Esselborn

Period: 01.08.2020 – 01.08.2023

Funding institution: DFG

Themes: technical safety, risk, nuclear power, automobile, FRG, GDR

Since the middle of the 20th century, population movements in the western world have increasingly been dictated and controlled by the individual skills of (potential) migrants rather than their national origins. Skills have not only been considered a condition for entering the country, but also for being able to work in adequate employment positions on the labor market. In order to be able to compare professional résumés acquired in different educational systems or even cultures, western countries have tried since the 1960s to make the skills of migrants measurable. Using the examples of the Federal Republic of Germany, Canada and Great Britain, the study first examines the attempts made in the context of international economic cooperation, to evaluate and compare skills acquired abroad by migrants. Second, there is the question of whether and how knowledge of the skills of migrants has been utilised as a measure to esure that migration does not, or will not, overload the social system.

Project leader(s): Olga Sparschuh

Project type: Postdoc-Projekt / Post Doc Project

The next stage of this long-term project will attempt to synthesise previous research. The aim is to identify and historically understand the characteristics of modern technology, its social functions and its secondary consequences for social, cultural and natural processes in modern societies. To this end, a longer text is currently being drafted, which is intended to offer a historical understanding of modern technology - and modernity as a whole. A first version of the results is now available.

In addition to this larger synthesis project, I am also involved in an acatech working group on issues of technology communication, particularly in the media. In order to understand the political and social dynamics of the controversy surrounding technology and science, a historical media theory is required. That is what I will endeavour to do. At the same time, this is an important building block for the synthesis work mentioned above.

This text is an attempt to make a proposal for understanding the technology of modernity in a short space (approx. 100,000 words). The text is freely available as an e-book and can be redistributed as desired, provided the source is acknowledged. After the previous version 0.9, it is now available for the first time in authoritative form in version 1.0. I look forward to feedback and discussions.

Downloads

Technik der Moderne – Ein Vorschlag zu ihrem Verständnis, Version 1.0 (ca. 300 Seiten, pdf 6,4 MB)

Änderungen und Ergänzungen in Version 1.0 gegenüber Version 0,9 (2 Seiten, pdf 68 KB)

Technik der Moderne – Ein Vorschlag zu ihrem Verständnis, Version 0.9 (ca. 300 Seiten, pdf 6,3 MB

Projektleitung: Ulrich Wengenroth

Logistics, both materially and metaphorically, is tied to histories of urbanization. As a managerial rationality and a material practice for reorganizing global space in service of expanding the total circuit of flows, it is fundamentally dependent on cities and their infrastructures to keep the constant movement of flows going. The systems that coordinate the circulation of goods, ideas, and capital into integrated networks—from roads and railways to loading docks, bonded warehouses, and global communications—shape built environments, by creating operational landscapes of connectivity and transmission; designed according to a paradigm of efficiency and control. In all these regards, logistics has been central to Singapore’s urban development during the era of “First Globalizations.” Shaped by its long history of maritime commerce, the Southeast Asian metropolis was held together neither by a single language nor by political integration—although it formed part of the British Empire. Rather, it was defined by mobility and circulation, that is the constant flow of goods, people, knowledge, and commodities: a logistical city integrated by “free” trade and the forces of capital in search of profits on the forest frontiers of the Malay Archipelago. By exploring Singapore’s logistical urbanization between 1848 and 1942, my research aims to critically unpack these relations between the built networks that coordinate the circulation of things, and their effects on the everyday urban experience.

Project leader(s): Dr. Felix Mauch

Period: 01.01.2016 – 31.12.2022

Project type: ["Postdoc-Projekt \/ Post Doc Project"]

Funding institution: TUM

The project aims to analyze practices of evidence concerning technical safety in both German states between the 1950s and the 1980s, using two specific technological fields – automobiles and nuclear power – as case studies. As key technologies of the atomic and the consumer age, both fields have had a substantial part in transforming the idea of safety/security into a societal core value. Making use of the chiasmus “practicing evidence – evidencing practice”, we study discourses as well as concrete practices of technical safety as an increasingly important precondition for the societal acceptance of technology.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Karin Zachmann, Dr. Stefan Esselborn

Period: 01.04.2017 – 31.03.2020

Project type: ["Postdoc-Projekt \/ Post Doc Project"]

Funding institution: DFG

This study addresses the global spread of disease vector control regimes, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) sent scientists and experts to remote areas in Africa, the Americas, and Asia to study and transfer methods of combating insect vectors of diseases in developing countries. In doing so, they attempted to develop a distinctive environmental approach to control vector-borne diseases in the emerging Global South, and to apply this approach across contexts. This study takes as its particular subject of inquiry the circulation of knowledge between malaria and river blindness campaigns and hence the various attempts to control anopheles and black flies by techniques such as large-scale spraying of pesticides, water management and bush clearing. Local contingencies as well as the implementation of environmental protection measures gradually re-casted medical development policies. I investigate this transformation by drawing on processes in decolonizing areas in Africa and underdeveloped areas in the Americas. Tracing what has been called in an imperial context the “selective bricolage” (Ann Stoler) of ideas and practices, I will focus on understudied but fertile spatial, temporal, and epistemological connections and exchanges.

Project leader(s): Dr. Sarah Ehlers

Period:

Project type: ["Postdoc-Projekt \/ Post Doc Project"]

Funding institution: TUM

Situated at the intersection of science and technology studies, communication studies, and critical race studies, my research investigates the public circulation of scientific knowledge about racialization, health inequalities, and environmental contamination. My current research project, “Planning for Persistent Environmental Contamination: Public Health, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, and Technoscience in Canada,” examines methodologies employed by citizen science projects to gather evidence of environmental contamination in a settler colonial context where this evidence is itself contested. Scientists have long relied upon the labor of “lay” or “amateur” data collectors whose situated knowledge of localities, access to data collection sites, and ability to devote their time and labor have provided context and direction in the production of scientific knowledge. In considering how evidence of harm is produced, I analyze contested practices of measurement and negotiations between First Nations actors, toxicologists, industry, and government policymakers over what counts as evidence.

Project leader(s): Sarah Blacker

Period:

Project type: ["Postdoc-Projekt \/ Post Doc Project"]

Funding institution: TUM

“BesserLesen” is a joint project that will provide a demonstrative app that is embedded in an accompanying didactic concept for cooperative reading promotion for children of elementary school age. An AI-based automatic pronunciation assessment is employed, facilitating learning at an individual learning pace and contributing to the improvement of children's reading skills by providing individual feedback.

Project leader(s): PD Dr. Jana Heinz

Period: 01.03.2023-28.02.2026

Funding institution: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)

Themes: Leseförderung durch eine in pädagogische Lehr- und Lernsettings eingebettete App und KI-gestützte Spracherkennung

The BioNET project analyzes the expectations and potentials for the implementation of bio-based negative emissions in selected regions and provides a problem-adequate knowledge base for the evaluation of bio-based NETs in Germany.

Project leader(s): Dr. Nils Matzner

Period: 01.01.2022-31.12.2024

Funding institution: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)

Themes: Klimawandel; Negative Emissionsn; Carbon Dioxide Removal; Biomasse; Vertrauen in Wissenschaft

For a long time, the participation of laypersons in research was regarded as hardly compatible with the self-image of modern science. However, this is beginning to change. A socio-epistemic arrangement based on the participation of laypersons in the research process is currently establishing itself under the banner of Citizen Science. This leads to the emergence of new functional relationships in which knowledge is co-produced, new forms of worksharing are evolving and established role models become disputable. Digitisation is regarded as the technological driver of current Citizen Science. Citizen Science is associated with science policy expectations of a democratization of science and a participatory coping with social challenges.

The question is how evidence practices function in Citizen Science – in view of the participation of actors who do not belong to certified scientific professional communities. (How) can knowledge be regarded as credible and action-oriented even if the social circle of those involved in research transcends the professional scientific context?

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Partner

• Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel (Uni Mainz)

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sabine Maasen; Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel (Uni Mainz)

Period: 05/2017 - 04/2020

Project type: Array

Funding institution: DFG

Prototypes are able to make vague but visible statements about future technologies and about how one might possibly interact with them. Moreover, they open up alternatives but are able to direct imaginations along a certain path. For instance, in how far does the design of an autonomous vehicle convey visions of tomorrow’s traffic? Besides, are visions that are materialised through prototypes more likely about to be realised? Against this backdrop, prototypical design can be regarded as a model for contemporary societal learning and innovating.

The sub-project “PROLAB – Living Labs as Prototypical Milieus” focuses on how prototypes within the fields of transport and health are conceptualised by potential users, designers and industrial stakeholders. This raises issues of how learning and innovating take place in so-called living labs: how is this influenced by different participating actors and by digitisation? In turn, it can be asked, what kinds of participation do living labs facilitate? Within the project, designed prototypes will be followed throughout their whole formation process, including, for example, via hackathons. They will ultimately be presented at an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum Nuremberg.

Funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the funding initiative „Die Sprache der Objekte – Materielle Kultur im Kontext gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen“

Link to the official website: http://prototyping-futures.org/

Partner

Cooperation partners in the collaborative project: Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz (JGU), Deutsches Museum Nürnberg, Interaction Design Lab at tge University for Applied Sciences Potsdam

Subprojects

Part of the collaborative project „PROTOTYP – Material design of the future. Prototypes as communication media of the new.” (coordinator: Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel, Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz (JGU)).

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sabine Maasen

Period: 09.2018 – 08.2021

Project type: Third-party funded Project, Consortium Project

Funding institution: BMBF

The dissertation project focuses on (re)configurations of nature and technology in and of food innovations. By looking at the ever-changing relations of nature and technology, it investigates a currently specific form of the political, through which TechnoSociety actualizes.

Project leader(s): Laura Trachte

Period:

Project type: Array

Cities like Vienna or Munich are currently growing in terms of population numbers and construction activities. However, there are buildings, apartments, offices and shops that are not used over a longer period of time. Different actors, such as, different departments of the city administration, house owners, neighbours, interest groups, NGOs and researchers, hold diverging positions on this issue. They develop and apply different practices and strategies for appropriating urban space within the diverging but nevertheless related dynamics of urban growth and vacancy.

In this project, I explore practices of appropriating urban space in their epistemic, technical, material, social, emotional, embodied, spatiotemporal, and economic dimensions. Appropriation in dense urban spaces always goes along with disappropriation. Thus, it includes deeply moral and political questions: How should urban space be distributed? How could living and working be organised? What are legitimate private and public demands and how should they be balanced? Against this backdrop, knowledge and knowledge practices play a crucial role. How actors make sense of urban growth and vacancy has social and material effects – it allows for certain measures and actions and blends out or restrict others. Thus, debates and practices of appropriating urban space negotiate relations between growth, decline and displacement.

Controversies around the appropriation of urban space are not a new phenomenon (think, for instance of the occupation of vacant buildings in many German and Austrian cities in the 1970s and 80s). Yet, the question arises if appropriation of space gains a specific quality under the conditions of a TechnoSociety – including the ubiquity of technological innovations and applications as well as a redistribution of expertise and agency.

Project leader(s): Andrea Schikowitz

Period: since 2018

Project type: Post Doc Project

The robot is a social project that arises from people’s ideas about other people. The social models (human factors) used in the development environments are sometimes less context-sensitive than the hopes and goals formulated in the project descriptions of the funding lines may suggest. My project tries to look at the development of robots as a complex interconnection of social concepts and programming logics. I concentrate on a developmental ethnographic approach in which the social scientist is involved in the programming of robots and thus gains “practical knowledge” about how the “social” is built into the machine.

Project leader(s): Henning Mayer

Period:

Project type: Array

Investigating the perception and (re)presentation of robotic technology as (in)animate and (in)agentic the context of human-robot-interaction, research and development practice, science communication, marketing, media discourse and political discourse.

2015 – 2017: Supported by a Andrea von Braun-Foundation PhD scholarship.

Project leader(s): Dipl.-Psych. Laura Voss

Period: 2014-2019

Project type: ["phd"]

Funding institution: 2015-2017: Andrea von Braun Foundation

Spaceflight activities are currently undergoing a profound process of transformation. Different actors claim the paradigm of the “New Space Age” to be as one of increasing commercialization and privatization. New actors are appearing within the space industry and throughout its customer base. Universities and SMEs launch and operate small and cheap satellites of their own, NGOs apply space-based data, and governmental agencies as well as public institutions are increasingly dependent on critical communication and information infrastructures in orbit. At the same time, utopias of human spaceflight gain new momentum in their aspiration to carry humankind further into deep space, while near-earth space is falling victim to pollution and security risks emanating from space debris. Here, striking parallels to sustainability related policies and climate action can be identified.

This PhD project aims to establish genealogies and analyze epistemologies and technopolitics of the phenomena described above. The focus thereby lies on arising new relations between space and Earth, which are made available for one another under ubiquitous challenges of innovation and sustainability.

Project leader(s): Michael Clormann

Period: since 12.2016

Project type: Array

Funding institution: Exzellenzinitiative, Munich School of Engineering

The project investigates the emergence and interconnection of robotics and elderly care within the context of European innovation politics. In doing so, it does not presume the (in)compatibility between both sides. Rather it declares the material and discursive conditions, under which they become (in)compatible its primary research object. Here, the project proposes an ‘analytics of interfacing’, which focuses on the very practices and processes by which robotics and care are rendered compatible with for one another in the first place.

This will be shown by way of three case studies: European innovation policy discourse, HRI experiments in an R&D project of care robotics, and a project of public procurement of robotic solutions for geriatric assessment.

The aim of the overall project is to show the ubiquity and laboriousness of works of technological interconnecting. ‘Interfacing’ here becomes the central political, technological, social task of TechnoSocieties.

Project leader(s): Benjamin Lipp

Period: 10.2014 – est. 05.2019

Project type: Array

My research project focuses on the material and discursive practices of Translational Medicine. In doing so I assume that Translational Medicine responds to a state of emergency in a Foucauldian sense. More precisely, I argue that there have been diffusion attempts between medical research and practice. Nevertheless, both areas remain difficult to unite. Mainly in the policy discourse, the gap between laboratory and clinical practice is negotiated as an urgency. This gap is framed as a systematic problem of the German research system. Here Translational Medicine positions itself at the same time as the answer to this urgency. Translational Medicine offers a new organizational configuration as a solution. Here, processes of institutionalisation and professionalisation of Translational Medicine can be observed.

Project leader(s): Julia Klering M.A.

Period: 08.2016 – 01.2020

Project type: Array

The dissertation project “Technologies of Change” is about the role of technical universities within the context of an “innovation society”. It is the rising demand of research for innovation next to the rising need of its legitimization that is at stake there. Research should produce disruptive technologies; innovation shall operate in networked structures; overall, innovation is in charge of becoming reflexive. Currently, there is the call for more responsibility in dealing with innovation (RRI). No one would disagree on the statement that the social is to be equal with the technical. Technical Universities, like TU Munich, are in the midst of socio-technical innovating, knowing they are both, objects and drivers of these developments. Technologies of change are a hypothetical acquisition towards the question, how the technical university transform itself in such a way, that she comes into being, not just as object, but also as player in the game of socio-technical innovation. My case study shows, that paradoxically hybridization of the social and technical, in the end, dissolves into a dominance of the technical.

Project leader(s): Anton Schröpfer

Period: 10.2014 - est. 05.2019

Project type: Array

In-Forest is a multi-method collaborative study seeks to explore the interplay of valuation and inequalities in science, using the interdisciplinary and planet-critical field of forest research as empirical case. It examines which/whose knowledge is recognised on what grounds, and how social dimensions like gender and geographical location impact on scholars’ social and epistemic positions. Therefore, the project strikes a new methodological path by combining bibliometric and ethnographic methods with comparative content analysis of scientific publications. Our geographical focus is on South Africa and Tanzania, countries that are hotspots for forest research on the African continent for which we compile country-specific databases of forest science, along with a ‘global’ one.

Drawing on sociology of science and scientometrics, valuation studies, post-colonial and feminist scholarship, the study links hitherto disparate perspectives to enhance the understanding why imbalances in the social structure of global academia persist, which is a crucial precondition for overcoming them. While focusing on forest science and addressing its community for a joint reflection of results, the project will contribute to science studies by generating in-depth findings on inequality from a hitherto underexplored field. The African-European team seeks to provide essential input for on-going debates, such as on how to foster knowledge diversity for sustainable development and inclusivity as a principle of responsible research.

Projektteam:

• Dr. Susanne Koch – Project lead; TUM STS Department, Science and Technology Policy Group und TUM School of Management, Lehrstuhl für Wald- und Umweltpolitik
• Camilla Tetley – PhD candidate; TUM STS Department, Science and Technology Policy Group
• Dr. habil. Olena Strelnyk – Mercator Fellow; TUM STS Department, Sociology of Science Chair
• Prof. Nelius Boshoff – Project lead; Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), Stellenbosch University, Südafrika
• Dr. Similo Ngwenya – Post-doc researcher; Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), Stellenbosch University, Südafrika
• Dr. Rodrigo Costas – Mercator Fellow; Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Niederlande
• Jonathan Dudek – Junior scholar; Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Niederlande
• Dr. Amani J. Uisso – Senior researcher; Tanzania Forestry Research Institute (TAFORI), Tansania
• Shizuku Sunagawa – Student research assistant; TUM STS Department, Sociology of Science Chair

Dr. Susanne Koch
Tel.: +498928929209
Mail: susanne.koch@tum.de
Augustenstraße 46, 80333 München
Raum: 351

Project leader(s): Dr. Susanne Koch; Prof. Nelius Boshoff (Stellenbosch University)

Period: 01.02.2022-31.01.2026

Project type: Third-party funded

Funding institution: DFG

The Focus Group „Responsible Innovation Communication“ conducts research in the area of public communication of emerging technology using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an exemplary case.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller

Period: 01.04.2022-31.03.2025

Funding institution: Institute for Advanced Study

Themes: Science Communication, AI, expectations, sociotechnical imaginaries

People (working on the project at the STS Department): Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller, Dr. Aysel Sultan 

The Research Cultures in Germany project investigated how researchers in various fields and disciplines perceive working and living in Germany and what opportunities and challenges they identify for local research cultures in Germany. The aim was to develop a description of the current conditions from which the Foundation could derive ideas for its funding activities and for potential improvements for the future of research cultures in Germany.

Within the context of this project, we understand research cultures as multidimensional: they are composed of epistemic, social, organizational, and societal dimensions. We therefore also speak of research cultures in the plural: while there are frameworks at the societal and organizational level that apply to all research fields in Germany. Moreover, specific research fields have their own epistemic and social practices and norms against which they interpret and negotiate organizational and societal frameworks.

In Germany, working and living conditions with regards to research careers have gained attention in recent years, especially along the protest movements from untenured staff and early career researchers that became a popular debate under the #IchbinHanna and #IchbinReyhan (Bahr et al., 2022). This movement has pointed to precarious employment conditions and accompanying restrictions to quality, creativity, productivity, and also diversity in German research landscape. These protest movements, the evaluation of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz 2022, or attempts by some universities to establish new forms of employment, especially for postdoctoral researchers, have led to an intensive discussion of the situation of untenured staff. What is largely missing, however, are debates and analyses that take a systemic perspective and, in this sense, look at research cultures in Germany from the perspective of different actors and their interactions. This project aimed to emphasize some of the field-specific differences in sociology, environmental humanities, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to highlight the interrelation of different human and nonhuman actors (such as institutional structures, legal conditions) in navigating the challenges of everyday research life.

Our findings suggest that some problem areas can be addressed directly through changes in research funding. In many cases, we see the Volkswagen Foundation as an actor that could initiate important discourses in the German science system and thus achieve step-by-step changes together with other actors.

Partner

Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH

DHZW (German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies)

EvaConsult

Project leader(s): Michael Ploder, Joanneum Research, Graz/Austria

Period: Jan-Dec 2022

Project type: Consortium Project Third-party funded Project

Funding institution: Volkswagen Foundation

The “Evidence for Excellence” research project focuses on evidence practices in the demonstration and evaluation of scientific quality for research funding purposes. Project researchers are studying how different actors in European science and science policy understand and define high scientific quality in their work practices.

Project leader(s): Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel, Prof. Dr. Karin Zachmann, Dr. Olga Sparschuh

Period: 2017-2023

Funding institution: DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Themes: Evidence Practices in Science, Medicine, Technology and Society

• PI: Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller
• Researcher: Julia Feiler

In science and in society, the CRISPR-Cas9 system is currently discussed as revolutionary new genetic technology. The novel technique promises more precise and cost-efficient ways of genetically “editing” the genomes of a wide variety of species. Potential applications range from the drastically simplified production of genetically modified crops and livestock to the development of new gene therapies. In the agricultural sector, the new technical possibilities have raised hope that they will enable more resource-efficient and sustainable forms of agriculture as they could complement existing traditional breeding techniques. At the same time, the possibility of gene editing raises a range of ethical, political and social concerns and has stirred up debates about if, how and when these new technologies should be used.

As part of the transdisciplinary research consortium FORTiGe, which is funded by the Bavarian research association: forschungsstiftung.de/Projekte/Details/Forschungsverbund-Tiergesundheit-durch-Genomik-FORTiGe.html) we examine public and scientific perceptions and imaginaries of gene editing technologies. We focus particularly on potential applications of gene editing for livestock breeding in the specific Bavarian context. Using qualitative social science research methods such as interviews and scenario-based focus group discussions, we examine how different stakeholders, including farmers and breeders, perceive the opportunities and challenges of gene editing. We thereby facilitate inclusive deliberation about what the responsible development of gene editing technologies could look like in the specific national and local context of Bavaria.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller

Period: 09.2018 – 05.2021

Project type: ["Verbundprojekt \/ Consortium Project"]

Funding institution: Bayerische Forschungsstiftung

• PI: Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller
• Researcher: Dr. Sarah Schönbauer

Plastics and specifically microplastics in the environment are increasingly receiving public attention. Headlines such as “Dangerous mini-poison-bomb” (Focus online, 2012) or “Underestimated Danger – Plastic particles contaminate food” (Spiegel online, 2013) point to an increasing public discourse about microplastics as a potential environmental and health risk. Increasing public attention is going hand in hand with a surge in scientific and political engagement with the topic.

The project “Plastics – Publics – Politics” analyses how different stakeholders perceive and understand microplastics and how it is discussed and rendered potentially problematic in different social arenas, such as the media, civil society, science or policy. Thereby, the project generates a better understanding of the societal contexts in which current efforts to change the use and governance of plastics unfold.

The study employs qualitative social science methods, such as a media analysis of the representation of microplastics in daily and weekly German newspapers, interviews with scientists and citizen activists, and focus groups with citizens. Furthermore, the project fosters inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue between stakeholders from science, politics, civil society and industry, for which the project team collaborates with the German Federal Environment Office.

The project is part of the transdisciplinary consortium “SubµTrack: Tracking of (Sub)Microplastics of different identities” (https://www.wasser.tum.de/submuetrack/startseite/), which explores the toxicological, ecological as well as the social and political aspects of micro and nano plastic particles in the environment,. The consortium is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of a BMBF-funded initiative “Plastic in the Environment“ (https://bmbf-plastik.de/en). The project “Plastics – Publics – Politics” receives additional funds from the MCTS Lab “Engineering Responsibility”.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller

Period: 03.2018 – 08.2021

Project type: ["consortium"]

Funding institution: BMBF

Sola dosis facit venenum – »Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis machts, daß ein Ding kein Gift sei.« (Paracelsus 1538, Begründer der Toxikologie)

The longstanding dogma of toxicology »the dose makes the poison« has been subject to renegotiation in recent years, triggered by new insights from the molecular biological field of epigenetics. Epigenetics investigates how small chemical modifications upon the DNA (epi-, Greek: »upon«) can have a lasting effect on gene expression without being caused by genetic mutations. Novel research findings show that such epigenetic modifications have been found to change in response to environmental stimuli – such as toxins, nutrition or stress – giving rise to research approaches summarized as environmental epigenetics.

For the field of environmental toxicology, acknowledging the role of the environment in disease development via epigenetic mechanisms is something very appealing. Studies in this field investigate the harmful effects of environmental toxins, such as plasticisers or metals, on organisms. However, scientists have been puzzled for decades by the mechanism behind the long-term health effects of toxins that could not be explained by mutations. To answer this longstanding question, research in the field is currently highly invested in unravelling the basic mechanism by which toxins affect epigenetic processes in the body and how these changes can cause later life diseases.

In my dissertation project, I would like to address the following research question: what does the approach of environmental epigenetics make in-/visible in environmental toxicology and with what consequences? I am particularly interested in the shift of environmental toxicology towards adopting and adapting epigenetic approaches to their research agendas. I see this shift embedded in the ongoing process of the molecularization of the life sciences since the 1990s, drawing special attention to the fields of toxicology and environmental epidemiology. The fields current efforts to trace the long-term effects of toxic exposure back to the materiality of the molecular reflects this reorganization of the field towards a »molecular ‘style of thought’« (Fleck, 1979; Rose, 2007).

I want to illustrate this shift by focusing on the object of toxicity. How does toxicity come into being as a »recognizable object« (Murphy 2006) via contingent moments in the history of toxicology and environmental epidemiology? In what ways changes the object of toxicity in relation to the transformation of the field from a descriptive, service-science oriented science towards a mechanistic science, adapting molecular biology tools? What novel regimes of evidence are implemented to make toxicity visible? Where can we see frictions towards the classical toxicology and epidemiology? Drawing on literature analysis, qualitative interviews and participant observation, I ask myself how researchers think as well as do toxicity in their specific research contexts leading me ultimately to the questions of how toxicity is »made to matter« (Murphy 2006) in environmental epigenetic research on toxins and with what consequences for the perception of health and disease.

The PhD project is embedded in the project “Situating Environmental Epigenetics. A Comparative, Actor-Centered Study of Environmental Epigenetics as an Emergent Research Approach in Three Research Fields”, funded by the by the German Research Foundation and led by Prof. Ruth Müller.

Project leader(s): Sophia Rossmann

Period: Since 2018

Project type: ["phd"]

Are obesity and related metabolic disorders the result of a lack of self-discipline? This socially and medically widespread assumption is being challenged by medical research findings about the developmental origins of health and disease. For example, gestation and the first years of life are increasingly seen as formative for later-life disease risks. Experiences like over- or under-nutrition can condition the body in ways that increase or decrease one’s chances to develop obesity and metabolic disease in adulthood. In addition, some research findings even suggest that such ‘programming effects’ might not only influence one’s own health, but possibly also the health of one’s offspring. Disease risk might thus be inheritable across generations. Such findings have the potential to change how we think about and treat obesity and metabolic disease in health policy, medical practice, and everyday life. They highlight, for example, the significance of maternal nutrition for the future health of the unborn child – an assertion that can put parents under considerable pressure. The assumption that obesity and metabolic disease have developmental origins in early life can also lead to a closer examination of widespread stereotypes about obese people being ‘lazy’ or ‘unable to control themselves.’

In the social science research project “Articulating metabolic disease in a life course perspective,” I investigate how scientists study the developmental origins of metabolic health and disease in order to trace the social and political implications of this biomedical research field. I am observing the research practices of leading researchers in the field, conduct interviews and analyze current scientific publications in this area. I empirically investigate how different research approaches redefine obesity and its co-morbidities as life course diseases, and how this potentially changes notions of who is individually and collectively responsible for leading a healthy life. The research project thus aims to trace novel medical models of metabolic health and disease while they are still emerging in order to reflexively explore their wider implications and the possible challenges they might pose for society.

The project has been awarded an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship of the FWF Austrian Research Fund.

Project leader(s): Dr. Michael Penkler

Period: 09.2018 – 09.2021

Project type: Array

During the last two decades, we can observe a change in how the life sciences conceptualise life: no longer mainly based on an unchangeable genome, but increasingly as affected by the way we live. Environmental epigenetics is an emerging research approach within this perspective and proposes that human bodies and minds are malleable, able to adapt to socio-material environments, among them toxins, nutrition, and stressful experiences. These adaptions, researchers suggest, take place via molecular processes, altering the way our genes are transcribed and therefore the way how our bodies and health develop. While environmental epigenetics offers important novel insights for understanding human life as a biosocial phenomenon, it also extends the biological gaze from the laboratory towards suitable objects of study out in the real world – an extension that possibly implies social and political consequences for individual and community live, as well as for scientific research practices.

This thesis therefore studies how a psychiatric research institute uses approaches from environmental epigenetics to better understand the causes for and development of mental health conditions. Within epigenetic research in psychiatry, stressful experiences are described as a crucial “epigenetic environment” which gives rise to research strategies attempting to re-enact stress in the laboratory setting. In my thesis, I provide in-depth insights into these everyday research practices based on ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and literature analysis. I specifically investigate re-enactments of stress in three different experimental arrangements: cell models, animal models, and research with human material. Given this context, I argue that these different experimental arrangements enable equally different epigenetic accounts of mental health with diverse social implications.

In addition to the analysis of how researchers operate with environment/stress in their experiments, the work also looks at the environment of these research practices and the biological laboratory. Given this perspective, I demonstrate a divergence between the scientists’ ideal imaginations about conducting neat stress research and the actual research conditions. That is to say, that environment in epigenetics not only matters as a stimulus in stress experiments, but also as a real-world phenomenon that influences research practices, such as a noisy construction site, that might have effects on behavioural experiments with mice.

Given the central hypothesis of environmental epigenetic research – namely that environmental experiences are reflected in our biology, even down to the cell nucleus – my work provides important insights into how epigenetic perspectives are not only integrated into psychiatric research, but also how environmental epigenetics itself might change biological research. In other words, this thesis shows how epigenetics holds the potential to change the epistemology of the life sciences and our social science understanding of the biological laboratory.

Project leader(s): Georgia Samaras

Period: 2015-2020

Project type: ["phd"]

Project Team: Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller (PI), Dr. Lucas Brunet, Kay Felder (previously)

Academic excellence has become a key notion within science policy discourses in recent years. Many profound reforms in the European academic research landscape have been argued as necessary in order to improve the scientific excellence of different research systems. At the same time, the concrete meaning of the term “excellence” often remains opaque and only becomes tangible in the situated contexts of its use. In this project, we investigate how the notion of excellence is operationalized at an important site of academic evaluation and selection, that is in European funding programs for early- and mid-career researchers. The project takes an actor-centered approach and uses reflexive peer-to-peer interviews to explore the reviewers’ perceptions and understandings of scientific excellence in different research funding contexts.To this end, the project draws on concepts and methods from both Science & Technology Studies (STS) and Valuation Studies, which understand notions of value and worth as products of complex social processes and negotiations, not as prefigured categories that can readily be applied in a social situation. Consequently, we understand peer reviewers as actors that make complex decisions about the value of research and researchers against the backdrop of an ever-changing scientific system within which they have to navigate potentially conflicting ideas about what counts as excellent science. Through its exploration of reviewers’ perceptions of excellence, the project aims to contribute to an empirically grounded discussion in science and in science policy about the norms, values, and potential tensions that characterize evaluation processes for research funding in the context of an increasingly competitive research system.

The project is supported by the STS Lab Engineering Responsibility and the TUM Gender & Diversity Incentive Fund. Furthermore, the project is associated with the DFG research group 2448 “Practicing Evidence – Evidencing Practice”.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller

Project type: Array

Funding institution: STS Labor Engineering Responsibility, TUM Gender & Diversity Incentive Fund