Science, Technology and Society

The purpose of this seminar is to provide the students with an anthropologically based understanding of technological development, focusing on the relationship between innovation, social change and consumption practices and reflecting on the managerial consequences of these relationships. The course covers issues that include: ethnographic practices in innovation, design and corporate culture, ways that people and technologies co-construct everyday conditions and futures, the role of technologies in mediating relationships between citizens, corporations and the state; and the Internet of Things as a new realm of social relationality. Overall the course equips the student with knowledge and competences in order to manage processes involving technology and customer – experience interplay and to use market ethnographic knowledge for designing and evaluating human-technology interaction. These competences are applicable in a large range of service and welfare contexts.

In the face of globalization and its challenge to community-based studies of cultural processes, anthropology has become increasingly interested in innovation and technologies. In order to tackle the notion of cultural complexities and organizational dynamics, students are presented to the use of ethnography and anthropology in the study and design of devices, products, services and infrastructure. The course will deal with technologies in the following ways;  
1) technologies used on an individual level a) social media, algorithm and personal analytics (when people measure, track and monitor themselves)  personal interest: analog versus digital medias & materialities.
2). Technical systems such as communications networks, energy infrastructure, roads, and water and waste systems, that have become sites for conducting ethnographies of contemporary development, stakeholder networks, projects and relationships.  
3). Robots such as drones and welfare technologies. 

Used examination attempts in the former identical course will be transferred.

Courses that are identical with former courses that are passed according to applied rules cannot be retaken.

The student is automatically registered for the first examination attempt when the student is registered for a course or course element with which one or more examinations are associated. Withdrawal of registration is not possible, and students who fail to participate in an examination have used one examination attempt, unless the University has made an exemption due to special circumstances.