Background & Theoretical Stance

Background

The research division of Technoscience Studies belongs to the department of Technology and Aesthetics (DITE) at the Faculty of Computing at Blekinge Institute of Technology – a profiled University of Applied ICT and Sustainable Development.

The activities at ToS began in 1998 in the then Department of Computer Science and Economics with earmarked funds appropriated by the Parliament through the research bill 1996/97:5. A professor chair in ICT and gender research was filled the 1st July 1999. ToS is a new field of technology and engineering and is highly innovative in terms of development of gender research within technoscience, media technology, methodology for ICT related research and innovation system and cluster development.

In addition to research, undergraduate and graduate education the activities embrace work with knowledge networks, campus development, external engagements, internal work at BTH and research collaboration.

ToS is fully integrated into the profile of BTH in terms of both applied IT and interactions in triple helix constellations.

Theoretical stance

One of the aims of Technoscience Studies is to develop complex knowledges about ICT including media technologies as reality-producing technologies as well as of the transformations that follow in its wake. ToS is including perspectives of gender research developed within technoscience.

This presupposes participation in the appurtenant processes of transformation and knowledge production. Seeing ICT as reality-producing technologies rest on the idea that all of us, researchers in the field included, are enmeshed in development processes. No innocent positions exist.

ICT intervenes in and co-creates people’s everyday lives. On the other hand, ICT is developed and interpreted and practiced by people. This aim of Technoscience Studies is thus to create theoretical bases as well as practises for developmental processes in ICT-related fields as well as in the context of innovation systems.

The latter has increased in importance for ToS with a strong and upcoming research profile in innovation system and development including a number of international partners. Within international gender research with strong links to the dominant technological fields of our age – information and communication technology, biotechnology and material technology – there is a widespread understanding of the production of knowledge and technology as processes that take place in distributed systems.

In these days and age knowledge is generated in the overlapping borderland of universities, companies and other regional, national and international entities. These processes are not least apparent in our region Blekinge and affect the way in which BTH carries out R&D work.

The term technoscience connotes this understanding of the production of knowledge, technology and reality. The way in which technoscience is defined by internationally leading researchers such as Donna Haraway raises questions about boundaries and transgression of the boundaries between science, technology, politics and society, and between humans and nonhumans as in the processes of hybridisation between people and machines (cyborg theories).

The PhD program of ToS has belonged to the faculty of technology at BTH during 17 years.

Along with research activities based on the individual research projects, ToS also has a joint research programme organised as division seminars and courses in order to develop epistemological competence for theoretical and methodological work. Prospective doctoral students also participate in this research programme.