My research is concerned with search engine politics, the global information economy and local socio-political implications, critical theory, digital methods, and science and technology studies. Previously, I also worked on ICTs in the medical field, see my PhD below.
Currently, I’m working as postdoc researcher at the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) in Vienna/ Austrian Academy of Sciences. Here, I work on the project “GLOCAL SEARCH. Search technology at the intersection of global capitalism and local socio-political cultures” (funded by the Jubiläumsfonds of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), project number 14702). Check out the abstract on the ITA website; a longer article on the project has also been published in the ITA newsletter (in German though).
Before I was working as postdoc fellow at HUMlab/ Umeå University in the far north of Sweden. There, I investigated how search engines are socially shaped in capitalist society and what implications their “algorithmic ideology” triggers in terms of search results. Watch these movies in order to get a better idea of this project:
“Googlization of Everything & User Profiling“, Geek Girl Meetup Umeå in December 2011.
In my PhD (download), written at the Department of Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna, I investigated how medical knowledge is communicated between website providers and users concluding that search engines, Google in particular, play a central role in these sociotechnical practices. Drawing on the Actor-Network Theory (Latour) I conceptualized Google as an obligatory passage point (Callon) that translates between, but also crucially shapes website providers’ and users’ practices triggering new epistemic practices and demanding for new skills.
Finally, I’m also interested in the politics of methods and the performative character of digital methods more specifically. I occasionally attend conferences and workshops on this matter, as those organized by the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam (Richard Rogers and colleagues).
