Our research focuses on three themes:
- Environment and Justice
Environmental issues and related inequitable distributions of risk and vulnerability cut to the heart of contemporary technoscientific, social and political controversies. The Environment and Justice theme focusses on how knowledges about the environment come into being, coexist and intersect in shaping futures of collective human and non-human life.
Our research, teaching and engagement examine what options, policies, measures or interventions these knowledge practices make and have made possible, what alternative ways of knowing and being they suppress, and what this implies for human and more-than-human justice. We treat questions of knowledge production — including questions of whose and what forms of knowledges are seen as authoritative, valued and included, and conversely, what is being excluded and marginalized — as deeply political. We ask how and whose environmental knowledges come to matter in specific sociopolitical and material surroundings. In view of historical inequalities and the geopolitical dominance of Western knowledge systems, our approach to studying the making of environmental knowledge is deliberately broad and attuned to knowing otherwise. Among others, it includes practices in technoscience, indigenous life-worlds, international law, higher education and citizen science initiatives in various regional contexts.
With careful attention to social justice concerns and to thinking beyond disciplinary silos, our research examines how environmental knowledge relates to diverse transformative projects and aspirations in the past and present. Our goal is not only to reflexively interrogate how environmental knowledges have been generated, harnessed and have sedimented in the present, but also to open a space to imagine other horizons of possibility for future living.
The theme addresses the following guiding questions:
- How do we know, govern and tackle environmental problems?
- What are environmental knowledges and how are they produced and used? Whose perspectives are valued, authorized and in/excluded in knowledge making?
- How do environmental knowledges subtend diverse transformative projects in the past, present, and future?
We address these questions in diverse domains including, but not limited to, biodiversity loss and climate change, renewables and colonial histories of resource extraction, global environmental knowledge making, citizen science in diverse urban and rural settings, finance and risk, postgrowth futures, commoning and social-environmental movements, art/science interactions and transdisciplinarity, food and food justice, indigenous knowledge systems, emerging technologies such as AI, photovoltaics, or gene editing, discard and infrastructure breakdown, biological sciences in the global south. Using methods and approaches drawn from STS, geography, sociology, anthropology, history, and the arts, such as ethnography, speculative co-design, participatory mapping, and go-alongs, we seek to transcend disciplinary boundaries and conventions and produce knowledge that opens up other trajectories for future sociotechnical and ecological development.
Current projects:
- Transformative Higher Education and Science
This theme contributes and co-creates knowledge infrastructures to enable evidence-informed decision-making and pave pathways for the future of higher education, science and wider society. Higher Education and Science (HE&S) have long been building blocks of thriving societies. Amidst the complex challenges of climate change, inequality, rapid technological developments and globalisation, HE&S can play a pivotal role in helping societies transform towards better futures. The sector can strengthen collective capacities to innovate, respond to global challenges, and build societies that are greener, more inclusive and digitally skilled. As succeeding in a globalized world is increasingly predicated on access to HE&S, ensuring inclusiveness and equity becomes a key priority. This theme focuses on the critical investigation of systems and institutions of HE&S and the context in which they are embedded. This includes developments in policies and governance mechanisms, changing societal needs and expectations, and shifting cultural norms that shape what science and education are, what they are for, and how they should relate to society. We study how HE&S are transforming in response to these developments and shifts and evaluate what transformations are needed to ensure that they fulfill their public function, we study what structural and institutional factors obstruct and enable transformations.
The theme addresses the following questions:
- How do HE&S respond to changing societal needs and how does this affect their ability to fulfill its public function?
- How do governance arrangements and underlying values, norms, and paradigms enable or constrain HE&S’ ability to address societal and environmental challenges?
- What transformations are needed in HE&S to address societal and environmental challenges? What tools, methods, and approaches can support these transformations?
This theme spans across various disciplines, including higher education studies, policy studies, organizational studies, and science and technology studies. We do this across diverse geographical regions, drawing on expertise in policy design, implementation and evaluation of science and higher education, and science-policy-society interfaces and interactions. We carry out our research through the lenses of quality, equity, efficiency and sustainability. Our work informs policies and that can help transform the higher education and research system. We teach courses on various themes related to higher education and science governance and policy while using student centred-methods, including challenge-based learning. In addition, we provide leadership training and development programs to academic leaders. The theme addresses academic audiences (including students) and other societal stakeholders, such as policymakers, citizens, NGOs, knowledge institutes, academic leaders and corporate actors.
Current projects:
Completed projects:
- Technology and Societal Change
The relationship between technology and societal change is contested and multidimensional. For example, emerging technologies such as AI are developing through the exploitation of data workers and the ongoing energy transition that is being undertaken to mitigate climate change results in a growing demand for critical minerals. Many of these minerals are mined in the Global South at substantial social and environmental costs. In order to critically study such dynamics, this theme conceptualizes technologies broadly as the social and material tools, instruments and (infra)structures that order society and shape ways of knowing, doing and being. This enables us to critically analyze how technologies are shaped by specific prevalent cultural, political, and historical values and logics and evaluate the consequences for social and environmental justice. It also allows us to consider alternative practices, including the discontinuation of technologies that contribute to societal and environmental harms, and practices of making, tinkering, care and repair. We work across different domains including digital infrastructures, education systems, energy transitions, urbanization and urban-rural connections, agriculture and natural resource extraction.
The theme addresses the following guiding questions:- Which values, logics and rationalities underlie and guide current priorities and practices with respect to technological development and innovation?
- What are the societal consequences of these priorities and practices? Which and whose knowledge systems and values are foregrounded, or marginalized?
- How can technologies contribute to just and sustainable societal transformations and what conditions and governance practices are needed to ensure impact?
- How may socio-technical futuring, creative design and anticipatory approaches contribute to shaping and governing technologies?
Drawing on diverse scholarly fields, including science and technology studies, critical geography, history of science and technology, sociology of expectations and innovation and transition studies, we employ diverse research methods ranging from interviewing, archival research and discourse analysis to collaborative and community-based approaches. Together with actors in academia and society we reflect on, evaluate and co-create technological knowledge, instruments and infrastructures for transformative socio-technical change.
Current projects: