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