About the Research Network

The Research Network for the Anthropology of Technology unites anthropologists who work with research in different technology fields in universities, strategic research agencies and consultancies. Anthropologists conducting research in technology are gaining increasing prominence within many different interdisciplinary research fields: from health and medical technologies to biotechnology and robotics, to climate change, energy, infrastructure, media and telecommunication, and big data. Anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork methods have proven to be especially useful and sought-after in understanding human-technology relations in these domains, as well as in commercial and industrial technology development.

The main aim of the research network is to:

• Connect the institutionally scattered anthropological and ethnographic research in and on technology and enable analytical comparisons across technology fields;
• Create an outstanding research environment for PhD students, postdocs and established researchers, strategic research organisations and the business community;
• Reinvigorate the study of technology as well as relevant classic themes in anthropology;
• Develop crosscutting theoretical and methodological concepts such as technological communities, routinization, optimization and anthropological approaches to datafication;
• Enhance the researchers’ opportunities to take further leadership in international, inter- disciplinary research, pursue international funding schemes and initiate research consortiums.

The network is organised around four international research seminars and a closing conference that will give the network participants a unique opportunity to engage with epistemological, ontological, methodological and ethical questions pertaining to technology that run across the specific technology domains.

The network is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities in 2018-2019.

For more information about the network and its activities. Please contact the network’s convenor and chair of the steering group:

Maja Hojer Bruun, associate professor.