Skip to content
Menu
Technical University of Munich
Technical University of Munich

Exploring TechnoSociety

How do societies develop, which are already profoundly technologized and continue to do so in practically all areas of social activity? The Friedrich Schiedel Endowed Chair of Sociology of Science pursues a responsive and reflexive research agenda, which translates this question into empirical case studies and opportunities for inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue.

Our current research focuses on topics at the interface of research & development, organization & innovation, production & consumption, as well as participation & cooperation. In doing so we collaborate with national and international partners from both neighbouring fields as well as engineering and the natural sciences. In each case we investigate the technosocial conditions of our time, that is, the contours of a TechnoSociety.

In-Forest is a multi-method collaborative study seeks to explore the interplay of valuation and inequalities in science, using the interdisciplinary and planet-critical field of forest research as empirical case. It examines which/whose knowledge is recognised on what grounds, and how social dimensions like gender and geographical location impact on scholars’ social and epistemic positions. Therefore, the project strikes a new methodological path by combining bibliometric and ethnographic methods with comparative content analysis of scientific publications. Our geographical focus is on South Africa and Tanzania, countries that are hotspots for forest research on the African continent for which we compile country-specific databases of forest science, along with a ‘global’ one.

Drawing on sociology of science and scientometrics, valuation studies, post-colonial and feminist scholarship, the study links hitherto disparate perspectives to enhance the understanding why imbalances in the social structure of global academia persist, which is a crucial precondition for overcoming them. While focusing on forest science and addressing its community for a joint reflection of results, the project will contribute to science studies by generating in-depth findings on inequality from a hitherto underexplored field. The African-European team seeks to provide essential input for on-going debates, such as on how to foster knowledge diversity for sustainable development and inclusivity as a principle of responsible research.

Projektteam:

  • Dr. Susanne Koch – Project lead; TUM STS Department, Science and Technology Policy Group und TUM School of Management, Lehrstuhl für Wald- und Umweltpolitik
  • Camilla Tetley – PhD candidate; TUM STS Department, Science and Technology Policy Group
  • Dr. habil. Olena Strelnyk – Mercator Fellow; TUM STS Department, Sociology of Science Chair
  • Prof. Nelius Boshoff – Project lead; Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), Stellenbosch University, Südafrika
  • Dr. Similo Ngwenya – Post-doc researcher; Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), Stellenbosch University, Südafrika
  • Dr. Rodrigo Costas – Mercator Fellow; Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Niederlande
  • Jonathan Dudek – Junior scholar; Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Niederlande
  • Dr. Amani J. Uisso – Senior researcher; Tanzania Forestry Research Institute (TAFORI), Tansania
  • Shizuku Sunagawa – Student research assistant; TUM STS Department, Sociology of Science Chair

Dr. Susanne Koch
Tel.: +498928929209
Mail: susanne.koch@tum.de
Augustenstraße 46, 80333 München
Raum: 351

Project leader(s): Dr. Susanne Koch; Prof. Nelius Boshoff (Stellenbosch University)

Period: 01.02.2022-31.01.2026

Project type: Third-party funded

Funding institution: DFG

 

Climateurope2: Supporting and standardizing climate services in Europe and beyond.

The climate services community faces two key challenges: the need to support the development of climate services, and the development of methods and criteria that favour the quality assessment of the different components of a climate service to assure that it is trustworthy. 

Climateurope2 addresses these challenges by formulating recommendations to standardise the service practices, as well as engaging and supporting the climate services community, taking stock of what has been developed so far. The project also enhances the uptake of quality-assured climate services to support climate adaptation and mitigation. 

The main objectives of Climateurope2 include: 1) developing standardisation procedures for climate services, 2) supporting an equitable European climate services community, and 3) enhancing the uptake of quality-assured climate services to support adaptation and mitigation to climate change and variability.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Silke Beck

Period: 01.09.2023-31.08.2027

Project type: Third-party funded

Funding institution: European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme

 

Negative emissions and the policies of a projected future

IPCC scenarios suggest a need for the large-scale use of negative emission technologies to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Models project that Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) will deliver these future negative emissions, but significant concerns and uncertainties exist about its feasibility. This project aims to bring social science perspectives and insights to the center of the debate on BECCS and negative emission pathways more generally. It seeks to study the socioeconomic and political dimensions of model-based climate research by combining 1) a reconstructive analysis of the history of BECCS in models with 2) a political economic analysis of BECCS-related policy and practice and 3) a participatory engagement with modelers, scientists and policy makers. In doing so we ask to what extent models perform BECCS as a feasible mitigation option, what the implications of this (non)performativity are for the role of modeling in climate policy, and how closer attention to political and social analysis can help inform alternative mitigation scenarios.

The project employs mixed qualitative methods and a theoretical approach that combines political economy with insights from science and technology studies. Our main contribution lies in the ambition to advance a more interdisciplinary research agenda on emission reduction pathways and therewith involve the social sciences more closely in debates on how to meet the Paris Agreement.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Silke Beck

Period: 01.08.2022-01.12.2023

Project type: Third-party funded

Funding institution: Formas (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development)

 

The project is interested in understanding the role of transformative technologies in the energy transition and finding ways to align them with desirable societal futures.

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Silke Beck

Period: 15.09.2023-31.08.2026

Funding institution: GoTransTech TUM Innovation Network

 

The BioNET project analyzes the expectations and potentials for the implementation of bio-based negative emissions in selected regions and provides a problem-adequate knowledge base for the evaluation of bio-based NETs in Germany.

Project leader(s): Dr. Nils Matzner

Period: 01.01.2022-31.12.2024

Funding institution: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)

Themes: Klimawandel; Negative Emissionsn; Carbon Dioxide Removal; Biomasse; Vertrauen in Wissenschaft

 

 

For a long time, the participation of laypersons in research was regarded as hardly compatible with the self-image of modern science. However, this is beginning to change. A socio-epistemic arrangement based on the participation of laypersons in the research process is currently establishing itself under the banner of Citizen Science. This leads to the emergence of new functional relationships in which knowledge is co-produced, new forms of worksharing are evolving and established role models become disputable. Digitisation is regarded as the technological driver of current Citizen Science. Citizen Science is associated with science policy expectations of a democratization of science and a participatory coping with social challenges.

The question is how evidence practices function in Citizen Science – in view of the participation of actors who do not belong to certified scientific professional communities. (How) can knowledge be regarded as credible and action-oriented even if the social circle of those involved in research transcends the professional scientific context?

→ Website

Partner

  • Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel (Uni Mainz)

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sabine Maasen; Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel (Uni Mainz)

Period: 05/2017 - 04/2020

Project type: Array

Funding institution: DFG

Prototypes are able to make vague but visible statements about future technologies and about how one might possibly interact with them. Moreover, they open up alternatives but are able to direct imaginations along a certain path. For instance, in how far does the design of an autonomous vehicle convey visions of tomorrow’s traffic? Besides, are visions that are materialised through prototypes more likely about to be realised? Against this backdrop, prototypical design can be regarded as a model for contemporary societal learning and innovating.

The sub-project “PROLAB – Living Labs as Prototypical Milieus” focuses on how prototypes within the fields of transport and health are conceptualised by potential users, designers and industrial stakeholders. This raises issues of how learning and innovating take place in so-called living labs: how is this influenced by different participating actors and by digitisation? In turn, it can be asked, what kinds of participation do living labs facilitate? Within the project, designed prototypes will be followed throughout their whole formation process, including, for example, via hackathons. They will ultimately be presented at an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum Nuremberg.

Funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the funding initiative „Die Sprache der Objekte – Materielle Kultur im Kontext gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen“

Link to the official website: http://prototyping-futures.org/

Partner

Cooperation partners in the collaborative project: Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz (JGU), Deutsches Museum Nürnberg, Interaction Design Lab at tge University for Applied Sciences Potsdam

Subprojects

Part of the collaborative project „PROTOTYP – Material design of the future. Prototypes as communication media of the new.” (coordinator: Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel, Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz (JGU)).

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Sabine Maasen

Period: 09.2018 – 08.2021

Project type: Third-party funded Project, Consortium Project

Funding institution: BMBF

Moving to Product-Service Systems (PSS) makes it increasingly challenging to coordinate the interaction between an increasingly heterogeneous group of actors. This requires

  1. innovation work, defined as the social praxis of developing innovations. Such innovation work must be
  2. periodically evaluated and refined. Finally,
  3.  in a process of institutional reflexivity, the emerging organizational forms of cycle-management must themselves be monitored and adjusted. Sub-project A11 addresses the third level: How can organizational arrangements themselves be cyclically evaluated and refined?

It aims at identifying appropriate forms of institutional reflexivity and develops a participatory approach to co-design them with relevant stakeholders.

→ Website

Project leader(s): PD Dr. Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Prof. Dr. Sabine Maasen, Tobias Drewlani, Johan Buchholz, Dr. Uli Meyer

Period:

Project type: ["Drittmittelprojekt \/ Third-party funded Project"]

Funding institution: DFG

Evidence is continually growing in importance for political, societal, and individual decisions, despite increasing talk of an impending ‘post-factual era’. Evidence is based on data that is collected in a scientific fashion, but is also a social phenomenon. How and by whom is it created and used, and what impact does this have? These are the main questions that our Research Group has set out to investigate. Since evidence is an issue that concern many different scientific disciplines, our group is interdisciplinary in outlook. Our six sub-projects include scholars from the subject areas History of Technology, Sociology of Science/MCTS, History and Ethics of Medicine, Marketing and Consumer Research, as well as History of Science and Technology.

  • Speaker: Prof. Dr. Karin Zachmann
  • Co-Speaker: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sascha Dickel (Sociology of Science, University of Mainz)
  • Coordinator: Dr. Olga Sparschuh

→ Website

Subprojects

subProject 4: The Role of Moralization in the Interpretation and Use of Nutritional Evidence

2020 – 2023

This project examines the evidence practices of consumers in the field of nutrition. Nutrition is an evolutionary and culturally engrained practice that has only recently – approximately the last  hundred years – been strengthened, confronted or changed by findings from the nutritional sciences. The results of the first research phase show that evidence – understood as meaningful and  socially accepted knowledge and guiding consumer action – is not only based on scientific knowledge, but is influenced by heuristics and values. This is especially the case when scientific  knowledge is fragile and in conflict with intuitive judgments of right or wrong and good or bad.

  • Prof. Dr. Jutta Roosen
  • Edoardo Maria Pelli

subproject 5: The Risk Industry. Evidence for safety as a new field of research and enterprise (1960s to 1980s)

08.2020 – 08.2023

This project investigates changing evidence practices for technical safety in Germany during a key period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Whereas the first project phase focused mainly on the two technological domains of nuclear and automotive technology, the second phase will concentrate on the emergence of what we call the risk industry. We use this term to describe the new field of academic as well as commercial activity arising since the late 1960s, which used the concept of risk as a central category in order to produce and apply knowledge on and evidence for (technical) safety – in an engineering, political-discursive, as well as entrepreneurial sense. The project aims to describe the historical development of this new field of knowledge in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and to analyze its role in the establishment of a new evidence regime for technical safety since the 1970s.

  • Prof. Dr. Karin Zachmann
  • Dr. Stefan Esselborn

Subproject 8: Obviously Excellent? Evidence practices in preparing scientific research and biographies when applying for ERC starting and consolidator grants

In the contemporary scientific system, high scientific quality – often framed as excellence – has become both a key goal of scientific and political activities and the center of many controversies How, for example, can excellence be defined, measured, compared and made  evident? Subproject 8 focuses on evidence practices in the evaluation of scientific quality for research funding purposes

  • Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller
  • Dr. Mallory James

Project leader(s): Prof. Dr. Karin Zachmann

Period: 13.12.2016 – 30.09.2023

Project type: Verbundprojekt / Consortium Project

Funding institution: DFG

 

Co-creation—the practice of bringing together diverse actors in a joint innovation activity to mutual benefit— has emerged as a widely desired key resource in current attempts to enhance innovation processes and outcomes. The European Research Consortium SCALINGS explores the avenues and limits for the wider dissemination and use of co-creation practices across Europe.
Through a multi-sited, embedded, and comparative experimental research design, SCALINGS studies the unique implementations and outcomes of three co-creation instruments: innovation procurement, living labs, and co-creation facilities. The consortium focuses on two technology domains (robotics and urban energy systems) across 10 partner countries. SCALINGS aims to strengthen opportunities for best practice transfer and a socially robust upscaling of co-creation, while improving our understanding of how co-creation practices relate to the social, cultural, economic, and institutional environments in which they are implemented. SCALINGS is an interdisciplinary project that brings together social scientists, engineers, policy-makers, and industry partners from all over Europe.
The project SCALINGS is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the specific objective Science with and for Society of Horizon 2020. This objective is to build effective cooperation between science and society, to recruit new talent for science and to pair scientific excellence with social awareness and responsibility.

http://www.scalings.eu/

Partner

Project leader(s): Prof. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

Period: 09.2018 – 09.2021

Project type: ["consortium"]

Funding institution: Horizon 2020

 

The dissertation project focuses on (re)configurations of nature and technology in and of food innovations. By looking at the ever-changing relations of nature and technology, it investigates a currently specific form of the political, through which TechnoSociety actualizes.

Project leader(s): Laura Trachte

Period:

Project type: Array

Cities like Vienna or Munich are currently growing in terms of population numbers and construction activities. However, there are buildings, apartments, offices and shops that are not used over a longer period of time. Different actors, such as, different departments of the city administration, house owners, neighbours, interest groups, NGOs and researchers, hold diverging positions on this issue. They develop and apply different practices and strategies for appropriating urban space within the diverging but nevertheless related dynamics of urban growth and vacancy.

In this project, I explore practices of appropriating urban space in their epistemic, technical, material, social, emotional, embodied, spatiotemporal, and economic dimensions. Appropriation in dense urban spaces always goes along with disappropriation. Thus, it includes deeply moral and political questions: How should urban space be distributed? How could living and working be organised? What are legitimate private and public demands and how should they be balanced? Against this backdrop, knowledge and knowledge practices play a crucial role. How actors make sense of urban growth and vacancy has social and material effects – it allows for certain measures and actions and blends out or restrict others. Thus, debates and practices of appropriating urban space negotiate relations between growth, decline and displacement.

Controversies around the appropriation of urban space are not a new phenomenon (think, for instance of the occupation of vacant buildings in many German and Austrian cities in the 1970s and 80s). Yet, the question arises if appropriation of space gains a specific quality under the conditions of a TechnoSociety – including the ubiquity of technological innovations and applications as well as a redistribution of expertise and agency.

Project leader(s): Andrea Schikowitz

Period: since 2018

Project type: Post Doc Project

The robot is a social project that arises from people’s ideas about other people. The social models (human factors) used in the development environments are sometimes less context-sensitive than the hopes and goals formulated in the project descriptions of the funding lines may suggest. My project tries to look at the development of robots as a complex interconnection of social concepts and programming logics. I concentrate on a developmental ethnographic approach in which the social scientist is involved in the programming of robots and thus gains “practical knowledge” about how the “social” is built into the machine.

Project leader(s): Henning Mayer

Period:

Project type: Array

 

Investigating the perception and (re)presentation of robotic technology as (in)animate and (in)agentic the context of human-robot-interaction, research and development practice, science communication, marketing, media discourse and political discourse.

2015 – 2017: Supported by a Andrea von Braun-Foundation PhD scholarship.

Project leader(s): Dipl.-Psych. Laura Voss

Period: 2014-2019

Project type: ["phd"]

Funding institution: 2015-2017: Andrea von Braun Foundation

Spaceflight activities are currently undergoing a profound process of transformation. Different actors claim the paradigm of the “New Space Age” to be as one of increasing commercialization and privatization. New actors are appearing within the space industry and throughout its customer base. Universities and SMEs launch and operate small and cheap satellites of their own, NGOs apply space-based data, and governmental agencies as well as public institutions are increasingly dependent on critical communication and information infrastructures in orbit. At the same time, utopias of human spaceflight gain new momentum in their aspiration to carry humankind further into deep space, while near-earth space is falling victim to pollution and security risks emanating from space debris. Here, striking parallels to sustainability related policies and climate action can be identified.

This PhD project aims to establish genealogies and analyze epistemologies and technopolitics of the phenomena described above. The focus thereby lies on arising new relations between space and Earth, which are made available for one another under ubiquitous challenges of innovation and sustainability.

Project leader(s): Michael Clormann

Period: since 12.2016

Project type: Array

Funding institution: Exzellenzinitiative, Munich School of Engineering

The project investigates the emergence and interconnection of robotics and elderly care within the context of European innovation politics. In doing so, it does not presume the (in)compatibility between both sides. Rather it declares the material and discursive conditions, under which they become (in)compatible its primary research object. Here, the project proposes an ‘analytics of interfacing’, which focuses on the very practices and processes by which robotics and care are rendered compatible with for one another in the first place.

This will be shown by way of three case studies: European innovation policy discourse, HRI experiments in an R&D project of care robotics, and a project of public procurement of robotic solutions for geriatric assessment.

The aim of the overall project is to show the ubiquity and laboriousness of works of technological interconnecting. ‘Interfacing’ here becomes the central political, technological, social task of TechnoSocieties.

Project leader(s): Benjamin Lipp

Period: 10.2014 – est. 05.2019

Project type: Array

My research project focuses on the material and discursive practices of Translational Medicine. In doing so I assume that Translational Medicine responds to a state of emergency in a Foucauldian sense. More precisely, I argue that there have been diffusion attempts between medical research and practice. Nevertheless, both areas remain difficult to unite. Mainly in the policy discourse, the gap between laboratory and clinical practice is negotiated as an urgency. This gap is framed as a systematic problem of the German research system. Here Translational Medicine positions itself at the same time as the answer to this urgency. Translational Medicine offers a new organizational configuration as a solution. Here, processes of institutionalisation and professionalisation of Translational Medicine can be observed.

Project leader(s): Julia Klering M.A.

Period: 08.2016 – 01.2020

Project type: Array

The dissertation project “Technologies of Change” is about the role of technical universities within the context of an “innovation society”. It is the rising demand of research for innovation next to the rising need of its legitimization that is at stake there. Research should produce disruptive technologies; innovation shall operate in networked structures; overall, innovation is in charge of becoming reflexive. Currently, there is the call for more responsibility in dealing with innovation (RRI). No one would disagree on the statement that the social is to be equal with the technical. Technical Universities, like TU Munich, are in the midst of socio-technical innovating, knowing they are both, objects and drivers of these developments. Technologies of change are a hypothetical acquisition towards the question, how the technical university transform itself in such a way, that she comes into being, not just as object, but also as player in the game of socio-technical innovation. My case study shows, that paradoxically hybridization of the social and technical, in the end, dissolves into a dominance of the technical.

Project leader(s): Anton Schröpfer

Period: 10.2014 - est. 05.2019

Project type: Array

To top