the-anthropology-of-technology
The Anthropology of Technology
The research group explores and understands the contemporary world through the development and implementation of technologies with accompanying social intentions and visions. We focus on the cultural aspects of technology and innovation, conducting studies that range from specific technological situations to technology as a fundamental worldview and precondition for contemporary cultural logic.
We aim to be the preferred partner in initiatives that include the exploration of technology and innovation as cultural logic, participation in both national and international collaborations where technology is examined or plays a central role in investigations.
One goal is to be present in technological hot spots, such as NTNU’s technological environments, while also providing fundamental critique and maintaining distance.
The balance between proximity and distance characterizes our empirical foundation, which is largely ethnographic and based on fieldwork. We seek to understand the generation and reproduction of various types of social forms through culture-specific ways of thinking and individual actions where technology plays a role at different levels; from vulnerable individuals encountering dropdowns menus through technological management and social technologies, to the introduction of robots in the workplace and education, and to environments around the development of technology. These situations, through a king of “empirical philosophy”, reveal what it means to be human in the age of technology.
The Anthropology of Technology research group emphasizes linking research and teaching as closely as possible, by involving students in research and integrating ongoing research into teaching.
Research Projects we are involved in:
Interdiciplinary centre at SU-NTNU
https://www.ntnu.edu/sosant/emerge
Ekstern nettside: https://www.emergecentre.no
In a world characterized by rapid transformations of technology, society and culture, we want to establish a practice for continuous, systematic development of education, to keep up with the world. At the front are the students themselves as explorers of emerging technologies and ways of learning. The goal is to improve universities, and other learning institution’s ability to facilitate continuous development of learning methods. This involves technology, organization, rooms, methods of learning and assessment. A dialogical teacher-student-relation is central, motivated by shared matters-of-concern in the exploration of an emerging world. We achieve this through an experimental approach to teaching wherein the classroom is considered as a “laboratory”, where we not only learn together, but also discover how to learn. The annual cycles of experimentation is at the heart of EMERGE, gathering, engaging, developing and making available existing recourses of education.
Contact: Håkon Fyhn
MultiFutures systematically broadens the scope for policy action towards sustainable societies by assessing and developing transition scenarios based on alternative economic paradigms.
Contakt: Jens Røyrvik
Limits to Digitalization (L2D): Energy transition hopes hinge on digitalization's ability to dematerialize. However, the digital is material. The cloud is a metaphor, made up of tangible infrastructure and data centers that rely on human and environmental inputs. Their overlooked footprints, massive and rising, jeopardize sustainability. Looking past cloud metaphors, we address data center footprints and conflicts. With unparalleled access to a secretive industry and broad participation from policy actors with conflicting digital agendas, L2D builds knowledge on the role of digitalization in Norway's energy transition.
Contakt: Jens Røyrvik
EEA project in collaboration with West University Timisuara, part of the EMERGE centre
https://classroomlab.uvt.ro
The ClassroomLab is a classroom where selected courses are taught, an infrastructure for conducting experiments in teaching and methodology methods, and finally an arena for collaboration between students, teachers, researchers and the world of work.
The overarching aim of ClassroomLab project is to integrate education at WUT and NTNU through the design of pioneering interdisciplinary modules that, through multiplier effect, will be incorporated into new graduate programs and relevant existing training schemes proposed by institutions with varying orientations, in order to address the rapidly altering need to cope with challenges related to work integration and marginalization of vulnerable persons.
Contact: Håkon Fyhn / Trond Berge
Interdisciplinary project supported by Fremtidens Campus and part of the EMERGE centre
How to facilitate academic-social presence among students on a hybrid campus? Ethnographically based study on the importance of subject-social interaction for learning and development - or: what should NTNU do with a campus?
Contact: Mathias Tømmervold
https://autoworkproject.org
We are now at a point in time when digital technologies are changing societies and work-life. Increasingly advanced, complex, and intelligent machines prove capable of performing work previously mastered by humans alone. The effects and implications of this for both individual workers and society are not yet known. AUTOWORK, an exciting collaboration between NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Monash University in Australia, will explore this transformation across three sectors poised to be particularly impacted by automation: Building, Sale and Service, and Healthcare.
Contact: Håkon Fyhn
https://www.cure-project.no
Energy transitions are changing society in fundamental ways – it involves not only changes in the production, distribution and consumption of energy but significant social and behavioural transformations as well that may question our understandings of democracy. There is consensus that in order for these measures to be efficient and successfully implemented they must be accepted by the public. However, despite the focus on acceptance by scholars and practitioners, active resistance towards low carbon policies and technologies seems to be increasingly widespread and visible at all societal levels.
Contact: Håkon Fyhn / Jens Røyrvik
https://biasproject.eu
Artificial Intelligence is increasingly deployed in the labor market to recruit, train, and engage employees or monitor for infractions. Therefore, the BIAS project will investigate its use in this context. The project will also study how human and societal biases are potentially reproduced in Al-based systems and develop tools to identify and mitigate these biases.
Contact: Håkon Fyhn
https://samforsk.no/prosjekter/enchant-energy-efficiency-through-behaviour-change-transition
ENCHANT – Energy Efficiency through behaviour Change Transition – is a project that aims to support the energy transition by testing the impact of interventions affecting energy consumption behaviour on a large-scale across Europe. The interventions will be developed, fitted, and tested with the objective to unlock an energy efficiency potential in the public, through behavioural change.
Contact: Jens Røyrvik
https://www.dialoguesproject.eu
In order to reach the ambitious challenges of the European Union’s Green Deal and the Paris Agreement to make Europe the first carbon neutral continent by 2050 while also driving innovation and job growth, swift action is needed involving a broad range of actors.
Contact: Jens Røyrvik
https://www.sintef.no/projectweb/higheff/
HighEFF has defined ambitious goals for development and demonstration of technologies that may improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions from industry.
Contact: Jens Røyrvik
Contact: Jens Røyrvik
PhD projects
Aina Bäckman
The project explores the labor that goes into immigration detention in Sweden. This anthropological undertaking draws on attendance at Sweden’s six detention centers in 2019 and aims to raise questions about the productive scenarios by which detention and deportations are realized.
Contact: aina.backman@ntnu.no
Alexander Berntesen
PhD project that attempts to challenge the view of resistance as a psychological intention with associated externalized activism, and rather to understand resistance ontologically as encounter. Part of the CURE project.
Contact: alexander.berntsen@ntnu.no
Kristoffer Nergaard
The project raises an old discussion about automation, and reopens questions related to skills, status and identity in craft professions, with the introduction of ever new AI-driven, digital technologies and robots in the construction industry. It is about the human consequences of automation, about how workers and work in the construction industry are affected by changes in technology, new materials, new tools and new forms of organisation. The project looks at historical changes in the construction industry, as well as explores contemporary practices, technologies and knowledge in the Norwegian construction industry with a particular focus on the skills of bilders and carpenters. The project takes a socio-material perspective, inspired by STS traditions, and has an anthropological comparative perspective. In particular, the focus is on how Automation as a term can be understood as not only a technical process, but also a process of social change over time. Part of the AUTOWORK project.
Contact: kristoffer.nergard@samforsk.no
Marie oppdal Ulset
One of the focal points in this research project is the production, exchange and automation of knowledge within higher education. Technology has impacted structures of learning for educators and students. In particular, with the rise of artificial intelligence, core-teachings and examination principles are challenged.This has set departments into ontological crisis by an inevitable self-examination of “What do we want our students to learn and how?”. Part of the EMERGE center
Contact: marie.o.ulset@ntnu.no
Trine Olsen Møgster
An ethnographic study of the cooperation between landowners, the municipality and residents in the development of Fornebu.
Contact: trine.o.mogster@ntnu.no
Members
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Trond Berge Associate Professor
+47-73598214 trond.berge@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Alexander Berntsen PhD Candidate
+47-73592398 alexander.berntsen@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Håkon Fyhn Associate Professor
+47-73591338 +4791743561 hakon.fyhn@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Kristian Finsveen Liven Researcher
kristian.f.liven@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Trine Olsen Møgster PhD Candidate
+4790596782 trine.o.mogster@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Kristoffer Nergård Phd-student
kristone@stud.ntnu.no -
Jens Olgard Dalseth Røyrvik Associate Professor
jens.royrvik@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Hans Martin Thomassen Associate Professor
+47-73413055 +4799501786 +4773598215 martin.thomassen@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology -
Marie Opdal Ulset PhD Candidate
marie.o.ulset@ntnu.no Department of Social Anthropology