research Theme
Coordinators:
Kornelia Konrad and Julia Hermann
Daily board:
Anna Bos-Nehles, Simone Borschi, Anne Dijkstra, Michael Nagenborg, Steven McGreevy, and Andreas Weber
Advisory board:
David Fernandez Rivas, Karin Pfeffer, and Marten van Steen
Support Staff:
Gea Nijland
Upcoming event: Emerging Technologies & Societal Transformations Conference 2024
On 25 September 2024, we organize the 2nd “Emerging Technologies and Societal Transformations” research theme conference. The aim of the conference is to share current research related to the theme, stimulate an interdisciplinary discussion about emerging technologies and how they affect societies, and to strengthen ties between researchers from BMS and beyond with similar research interests.
Please find the programme and book of abstracts here. The conference will take place in The Gallery, University of Twente.
Please register here for the conference until September 19. Colleagues from outside BMS or the University of Twente are welcome!
The Theme
Technological societies are in a continuous state of transformation. Technological developments come with important social, economic and political implications and are sometimes even disruptive. Artificial agents like robots and algorithms fulfil ever more complex tasks and challenge existing notions of agency, expertise, responsibility, and employability. The huge volume of data from increasingly instantaneously communicating devices and machines across platforms and networks is testing not only present-day security and privacy mechanisms but is also challenging norms of ownership. Emerging energy technologies and systems as renewables and electrolysis based hydrogen require new infrastructures, transport logistics, material supply chains, and create new environmental and social challenges and geopolitical relationships. The application of gene editing technologies may affect our responsibilities to future generations and our relations to our own bodies. How to understand these transformations? What ethical, societal and policy questions do they raise? And how to design and govern socio-technical innovations in a responsible manner? These are key questions guiding the research program ‘Emerging Technologies and Societal Transformations’.
The research theme has a twofold aim: (1) addressing fundamental and reflexive questions regarding the interactions between technology and society, in its own right and as they emerge in the other four BMS programs; and (2) engaging in empirical research, often in collaboration with technical researchers and designers.
SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION
The research program ‘Emerging Technologies and Societal Transformations’ has a descriptive, normative, and interventionist dimension. The central questions guiding research activities within the program are: How can new and emerging technologies affect society, culture, and human existence? How are emerging technologies shaped and how do socio-technical transformation unfold? How to evaluate societal implications? And how to take these implications into account in governance, policy-making, innovation and design?
These questions are addressed at multiple levels, since Socio-technical transformations occur at the micro, meso and macro-level: the level of individual users and human-technology relations; the level of social practices and organizations (e.g. in education, healthcare, industry); and the level of societal and political structures and processes, such as power relations, democratic institutions, legal regulation, and cultural change.
a) Human-technology relations
New technologies affect human beings in new ways, by influencing people’s behaviour, perceptions, motivations, and frameworks of interpretation. E-coaching systems influence the lifestyle of users. Augmented reality glasses affect interpersonal relations, and even change our notion of privacy. Telecare technologies change our relation to our bodies and reconfigure the relationship between patients and healthcare professionals. How to understand these new configurations of humans and technologies? How to rethink central notions in the humanities and the social sciences like agency, responsibility, perception, social interaction? How to determine the social acceptance and acceptability of new technologies? How to enable users to develop a critical relation to the influences of technologies? And how to take the impacts of technologies on users into account in practices of design and policy-making?
b) Technology, values, and social practices
With the uptake of technologies in society also common social practices are transformed. Learning analytics, teaching robots, and telepresence technologies change practices of teaching and learning. Carebots, diagnostic algorithms, and wearable technologies enable new practices in healthcare, and responsibilities shift from doctors to patients and vice versa. Production robots and algorithms affect practices of labour and work. Changing practices often go along with a rethinking of central concepts in education, medicine, and economics, like ‘Bildung’, ‘health’, ‘expertise’, et cetera. How do these changes in socio-technical practices and core concepts come about and what are their ethical implications? How can design and governance approaches take such changes into account or guide them into desirable directions?
Technologies are developed by various organizations, such as research universities, R&D institutes or companies. Furthermore, civil society actors play an important role in the development and societal embedding of technologies and in bringing about broader socio-technical transformations. How do networks and systems of innovation change? Which actor constellations facilitate the creation and diffusion of (socially) responsible products and services? What are effective ways to prioritize users, their needs and strengthen their role in research and innovation?
c) Society, Politics, and Technology
Technologies transform social and cultural structures, power relations and democratic institutions. Social media, algorithms for news collection and legal practices, and the rise of smart cities challenge fundamental characteristics of our liberal democracy. How to conceptualize these challenges, and how to deal with them in politics, in innovation, and in law and regulation? What new relations between states and citizens do they bring, and how are they related to global power structures and socio-economic structures and characteristics?
SOCIETAL IMPACT: Three Main Research Lines
INNOVATING RESPONSIBLY WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been put forward as a priority by the European Union, just as by Dutch science policy. RRI aims to enable the capabilities, structures and processes of researchers, innovators and the related organizations and innovation systems to anticipate and consider actual implications, do research and innovation in inclusive ways, and make these insights actionable. Different BMS research groups with expertise in ethics, philosophy of technology, science, technology and innovation studies, governance studies, public engagement and communication science contribute to this line of research. We develop conceptual frameworks and intervention approaches, and conduct empirical studies , for making responsible research and innovation happen at different levels of research and innovation processes and systems.
A broad field of emerging technologies are addressed in these projects with important clusters in the fields of nanotechnologies for health, food, energy, chemistry; in biomedical and health technologies, artificial intelligence, smart cities, blockchain technologies, robotics and drones.
More specific research directions include fundamental philosophical-ethical questions, such as how emerging technologies challenge concepts as identity, autonomy, democracy, or naturalness, and thus how emerging technologies may disrupt the self-understanding of human beings, trigger techno-moral change, challenge or contribute to environmental justice. Another important line comprises questions related to the governance and regulation of emerging technologies, such as experimental regulation, the governance of socio-technical transitions and (geo)political and justice implications. A third line focuses on socio-technical futures, such as the role of future expectations and imaginaries around emerging technologies, the exploration of different anticipatory and imaginary practices, and (constructive) technology assessment. Furthermore, we study innovation processes, practices, and systems. Here research interests include entrepreneurship, user innovation and citizen science, and innovation ecosystems.
Societal impact is created via multiple pathways addressing the macro, meso and micro level of research and innovation. Ethical and governance frameworks provide generalizable directions for implementing RRI in organizations, such as industry, research organizations, research funding organizations or civil society organizations. Other projects are conducted in collaboration with societal partners as cities and regional policy and support the shaping of responsible smart cities and regional innovation in inclusive ways, or bring researchers, innovators, start-ups, stakeholders and citizens in conversation around particular innovation fields, such as nanotechnology-based innovations for health, food, energy or water. Societal impact is furthermore created by addressing design projects, or exploring together with technical researchers and innovators possible societal implications, applications and conditions for the societal embedding of specific technologies. Here, impact is created via the shaping of research directions and design decisions, but also by sensitizing technical researchers and innovators for societal and ethical implications of their work, thereby contributing to capacity-building.
This research is largely funded by European projects, such as Horizon Europe projects and by national research funding, such as an NWO gravitational grant, Growthfunds, NWO-MVI or NWO-NWA projects, and strategic calls as NWO Smart Industries / Creative Cities.
Some examples of projects in this research line:
- NWO Gravitation grant: The ethics of socially disruptive technologies
- Dutch Growthfund programme Solarlab NL
- NWO Crossover programme on Emerging Technologies for Agroecology
- Research Ethics for Sustainability
- NanoBubbles
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY
Within the scope of societal and technological transformation, we pay special attention to the ongoing process of the digital transformation of society. While recognizing that research, development and deployment of computers date back to the beginning twentieth century, we study the ongoing digitalization of goods and services and the increased role of algorithmic interpretation and decision-making (e.g. AI) in concrete societal contexts such as eHealth, human resource management, and digital collections. Moreover, we focus on the bridging of digital and material worlds through the Internet of Things (IoT), robots and new forms of data-driven production (e.g. 3D printing) and the emergence of virtual and augmented reality systems that promise to extend the borders of the paradigms of embodied, situated and distributed cognition.
Not only is BMS at the forefront of making use of emerging digital research tools, we also are promoting Responsible Research and Innovation and Responsible Design by working together with relevant stakeholders including municipal, regional and national authorities, companies, NGOs, cultural institutions, and citizens. We do not only bring in our expertise into the design and evaluation process to enable and safeguard deployment of novel applications. We also develop and bring in a critical perspective to decolonize digital technologies, promote digital commons, and challenge AI myths. At the crossroads with the two other research lines, we study and support attempts at making proliferating digital and data infrastructures more sustainable.
Our contribution to the field is rooted in contemporary approaches to Educational Science, Human Factors, Human Resources, Philosophy of Technology, Public Administration, Science and Technology Studies (including historical approaches). While digitalization is an ongoing trend in many domains, we especially focus on algorithmic interpretation and decision-making processes within businesses, political institutions, smart environments (such as smart houses, smart cities, and smart ruban areas), digita cultural heritage, and digitalization of education.
Some examples of projects:
- NWO project: BRIDE
- Horizon Europe project dRural
- Marie Curie project on Authoritarian Smart Cities
- NWA/OCR project HAICu on Digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Heritage
NEW AND EMERGING INFRASTRUCTURE TECHNOLOGIES FOR GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY
Moving towards more sustainable societies is a long-standing concern with challenges ranging from the most local to global levels. In this line researchers are concerned with questions relating to innovations in socio-technical and socio-ecological infrastructure systems, such as energy, water or digital infrastructures. These new and changing infrastructure technologies are of major importance as they shape to a large extent the conditions for societies to become more sustainable. BMS researchers investigate the modes of governance of infrastructure systems in the diverse social and political contexts of the Global South and the Global North, environmental and societal impacts, and innovation processes and systems.
Societal impact is created via analysing and assessing governance models and providing policy advice in collaborative projects with societal partners, including governmental authorities, NGOs and the industry, and in pilot projects that allow to focus on conditions and implications of concrete local and regional implementation contexts. Moreover, societal impacts are identified and assessed from organizational and regional perspectives through strategic managerial models in collaboration with relevant stakeholders from public and private sectors.
Core competences feeding into this line of research are governance studies, science and technology studies, innovation studies, business and entrepreneurship, sustainability sciences, and ethics.
A broad field of new and emerging technologies are addressed in these projects, for instance smart grids, renewables (e.g. solar, wind, green hydrogen, anaerobic digestion), new (waste)water and solid materials treatment technologies, NetZero technologies (neutralization of greenhouse emissions), or technologies that affect the environmental impact of digital infrastructures, such as blockchain, Internet of things, or those enabling new data-intensive services.
More specific research directions include among others experimental regulation, how technological change enables or drives governance change, the role of discourses, frames and imaginaries in transitions, the role of recognition and protection of people’s rights, human-environment relations, societal and environmental life cycle assessments of products and services, future energy demand of datacenters, or alternative ways of designing infrastructures that are tailored to the diverse capacities and contexts of countries in the Global South and the Global North.
This research is mainly funded by European projects, such as H2020 projects, NWO-MVI or governmental funding. See some examples: