230189 SE (Non)Users, technological cultures and the politics of technology (2010S)

It hardly seems possible to comprehensively study contemporary cultures or societies without considering the role of technologies. Technologies such as the mobile phone, e-mail or surveillance cameras structure social interaction, while mobile music devices, computers and genetic tests have become cultural artefacts which play a key role in defining and performing their users' identity. Decisions to use a specific artefact in a certain (maybe non-intended) way, or even to abstain from the use of a technology such as cars or the internet, are always connected to particular constellations of sense-making-practices, in which potential users individually or collectively negotiate if and how a specific technology fits and figures in their lifeworld and everyday context. Hence, even in a seemingly ever more globalised world, there hardly ever is one standardized use of a technology, but a caleidoscopic plurality of meanings associated with it.
Also contemporary knowledge production within most sciences may not be fully analysed without considering the role of technologies and the way scientists make sense of them, be they as small as a DNA chip, or as large as a particle accelerator. Not radically different than in everyday contexts, also in science the uses of technologies, as well as their results, are negotiated in social and cultural processes.
In all of these contexts, the sense-making practices around technologies also have a political dimension. Not using a particular technology such as a car can be a deliberate ecologically motivated political act, or it can be the consequence of exclusion if one's body does not meet the standardised expectations built into the design of the vehicle. New technological possibilities often challenge and change established social meanings and identities, such as when brain scan technologies and their visualisations challenge established ideas of "normal" and "ill" human minds and brains. And sometimes meanings associated with certain technologies even become important facets of political culture and are laid down in constitutional laws, such as in the case of "atom-free" Austria.
In this seminar, we will focus on qualitative approaches and methods which allow to capture, understand and analyse sense-making practices around science, technology, medicine, and society. Students will read and discuss work using qualitative approaches to address these questions, as well as experiment with selected qualitative techniques such as interviewing, observation and discourse and image analysis. The teaching language of this course is English.

This seminar accounts for "Lehrveranstaltung mit Schwerpunkt auf sozialwissenschaftlichen Methoden".