Presentation of the Junior Professorship

The Junior Professorship focuses on basic micro-sociological research in a way that places particular emphasis on social science research into technology and on addressing the technological challenges of the present. Digitalisation and the energy transition, for example, are complex projects that are being shaped in tense collaborations - and which will bring about far-reaching social changes in the coming years.

Against this backdrop, the Junior Professorship investigates what people do with and against each other, and how they use and are used by the techniques and technologies in doing so. The Junior Professorship understands 'technology' as relational - as a reference that refers back to artefacts, bodies, and materials in a special way: it uses them and wears them out, but it also repairs, maintains, designs, tests, and destroys them; it confronts them as nature, consumes them as a resource, or wears them out as infrastructure. As technical references are intended to be useful, technology is always subject to testing and assessment. How handy, useful, functional or sustainable is the technology? Where and how can these assessments be made, and what are their effects? How can technologies escape this claim of assessment?

Based on this perspective, the Junior Professorship derives two initial main areas of work, which address the materiality and practical normativity of technology-related interactions. Thus, the Junior Professorship explores how and in which situations infrastructures in their specific materiality (e.g. in the fields of energy and transport) can be designed, maintained, assessed, and modified. And vice versa: How do these infrastructures shape interactions between users, planners, technicians, politicians, residents, etc.? What assessments do users make, and which values do technicians rely on? Which standards may be considered, which benchmarks are set by existing infrastructures? Which evaluations do algorithms suggest? How is appreciation expressed, for example that of local residents? The Junior Professorship observes how in the uneven field of tension of heterogeneous values things are 'happening' – how practices establish, that make technology work (or not) and interaction succeed (or fail).

The Junior Professorship analyses the outlined questions in an empirical way, drawing on the methods of qualitative social research, especially ethnographic methods.

In teaching, the Junior Professorship is engaged in micro-sociology, micro-sociologically oriented sociology of technology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The Junior Professorship teaches the fundamentals of micro-sociology, and in in-depth seminars focuses in particular on the role of artifactual arrangements when establishing actors and interaction. The Junior Professorship aims to investigate together with its students the variety of practical conditions in which people, materials, techniques, and technologies interrelate and combine.