Prerequisits:

There are no specific prerequisites.

However, prior knowledge of basic anthropological theories and methods.

Content (Syllabus outline):

Humans and technology are intricately intertwined in all areas of society today, from family, education, and healthcare to the economy and politics. Technology is often perceived as a tool that enables people to achieve specific goals—such as communication, transportation, or production. Anthropology, particularly in connection with the related field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), approaches technology more broadly—as part of social practices and cultural values. Technologies are not merely tools in human hands; they become actors that influence social practices, relationships, and even individual identities in various ways. Moreover, technologies are not neutral; they both reflect and shape social hierarchies, ideologies, and power relations. This includes how gender and racial biases can become embedded in technological systems—for example, in algorithms or AI applications that replicate or amplify existing social inequalities.

Students examine ethnographic case studies from different fields, such as health, migration and reorganization of work, and become familiar with anthropological methods of studying technology. The goal of the course is to develop a critical understanding of technology as a cultural phenomenon, the ability to analyse technological practices in a broader context, and sensitivity to the ethical and political dimensions of technological development. Suitable for anyone interested in the intersection between culture, society and technological change, the course will explore, among other topics, the following themes involving different types of technologies, from everyday objects to cutting-edge digital technologies:

• History of the anthropology of technology,
• Fundamental STS theoretical frameworks,
• Technological and data infrastructures,
• Technologies of care and health,
• Wearable technologies and surveillance,
• Algorithms, artificial intelligence and robots,
• Gender, race and power relations,
• Technologies and work.

Readings:

History of the anthropology of technology

• Bruun, M. H., & Wahlberg, A. (2022). The anthropology of technology: the formation of a field: introduction. In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology (pp. 1-33). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
• Escobar, A. (1995). Anthropology and the future: New technologies and the reinvention of culture. Futures, 27(4), 409-421.
• Ingold, T. (1997). Eight themes in the anthropology of technology. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 41(1), 106-138.
• Pfaffenberger, B. (1988). Fetishised objects and humanised nature: towards an anthropology of technology. Man, 236-252.
• Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual review of Anthropology, 491-516.

Fundamental STS theoretical frameworks

• Latour, B. (1993). ‘‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of Mundane Artifacts’’. Technology and Sociology, 151.
• Haraway, D. J. (1985). A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. Posthumanism.
• Law, J. (2008). Actor network theory and material semiotics. The new Blackwell companion to social theory, 141-158.
• Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press.
• Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (2010). Care: putting practice into theory. Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms, 8, 7-27.
• Suchman, L. A. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge university press.
• De Laet, M., & Mol, A. (2000). The Zimbabwe bush pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology. Social studies of science, 30(2), 225-263.
• Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In: W. Bijker and John L. (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society, Studies on Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press.
• Schneider, T., Brenninkmeijer, J., & Woolgar, S. (2022). Enacting the ‘consuming’ brain: An ethnographic study of accountability redistributions in neuromarketing practices. The Sociological Review, 70(5), 1025-1043.
• Mather, C. (2014). Avian influenza multiple: Enacting realities and dealing with policies in South Africa’s farmed ostrich sector. Journal of Rural Studies, 33, 99-106.
• Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, 1-33.

Technological and data infrastructures

• Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual review of anthropology, 42(2013), 327-343.
• Nair, V. (2021). Becoming data: biometric IDs and the individual in ‘Digital India’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27(S1), 26-42.
• Adams, V. (2016). Metrics: What counts in global health. Duke University Press.
• Srinivasan, J. (2022). The political lives of information: Information and the production of development in India. MIT Press.
• Abram, S. (2022). Electricity as a field for anthropological theorising and research: Electricity. In The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology (pp. 741-755). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Technologies of health and care

• Ahlin, T. (2023). Calling family: Digital technologies and the making of transnational care collectives. Rutgers University Press.
• Aceros, J. C., Pols, J., & Domènech, M. (2015). Where is grandma? Home telecare, good aging and the domestication of later life. Technological forecasting and social change, 93, 102-111.
• Hoeyer, K. (2023). Data paradoxes: The politics of intensified data sourcing in contemporary healthcare. MIT Press.
• Ong, A., & Collier, S. (2005). Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
• Ruckenstein, M., & Schüll, N. D. (2017). The datafication of health. Annual review of anthropology, 46(1), 261-278.
• van Voorst, R. (2024). The medical tech facilitator: an emerging position in Dutch public healthcare and their tinkering practices. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 11(2), 1-23.

Wearable technologies and surveillance

• Lupton, D. (2013). Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies. Critical public health, 23(4), 393-403.
• Lupton, D., & Jutel, A. (2015). It’s like having a physician in your pocket!’A critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps. Soc Sci Med, 133(2015), 128-135.
• Schneider, T., Brice, J., & Eli, K. (2025). Digital eating. Journal of Cultural Economy, 18(6), 797–809. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2025.2584037
• Tamminen, S., & Holmgren, E. (2016). The anthropology of wearables: The self, the social, and the autobiographical. In Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings (Vol. 2016, No. 1, pp. 154-174).
• Zuboff, S. (2023). The age of surveillance capitalism. In Social theory re-wired (pp. 203-213). Routledge.

Algorithms, artificial intelligence and robots

• Forsythe, D. E. (1993). Engineering knowledge: The construction of knowledge in artificial intelligence. Social studies of science, 23(3), 445-477.
• Forsythe, D. (2001). Studying those who study us: An anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence. Stanford University Press.
• Seaver, N. (2022). Computing taste: Algorithms and the makers of music recommendation. University of Chicago Press.
• Schüll, N. D. (2012). Addiction by design: Machine gambling in Las Vegas. In Addiction by design. Princeton university press.
• Pols, J., & Moser, I. (2009). Cold technologies versus warm care? On affective and social relations with and through care technologies. Alter, 3(2), 159-178.
• Wright, J. (2023). Robots won’t save Japan: An ethnography of eldercare automation. Cornell University Press.
• Keane, W. (2025). Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination. Princeton University Press.
• Hasse, C. (2022). Humanism, posthumanism, and new humanism: how robots challenge the anthropological object: posthumanism. In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology (pp. 145-164). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Gender, race and power relations

• Arora, P. (2024). From pessimism to promise: Lessons from the Global South on designing inclusive tech. MIT Press.
• Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity Press.
• Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336-349.
• M’charek, A. (2013). Beyond fact or fiction: On the materiality of race in practice. Cultural anthropology, 28(3), 420-442.
• Wright, J. (2019). Robots vs migrants? Reconfiguring the future of Japanese institutional eldercare. Critical Asian Studies, 51(3), 331-354.
• Wylie, C. (2019). Mindf* ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s plot to break the world. Profile Books.
• Madianou, M. (2019). Technocolonialism: Digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. Social media and society, 5(3), 2056305119863146.

Technologies and work

• Hoeyer, K., & Wadmann, S. (2020). ‘Meaningless work’: How the datafication of health reconfigures knowledge about work and erodes professional judgement. Economy and Society, 49(3), 433-454.
• Del Castillo, A. P., Galanos, V., Stewart, J. K., Ekbia, H. R., Nowotny, H., Ulnicane, I., … & Mandinaud, V. (2024). Artificial intelligence, labour and society.
• Ritter, C. (2023). Digital ethnography: Understanding platform labour from within.
• Bruun, M. H., & Krause-Jensen, J. (2022). Inside Technology Organisations: Imaginaries of Digitalisation at Work: Organisation. In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology (pp. 485-505). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Digital ethnography – methods

• Ahlin, T., & Li, F. (2019). From field sites to field events: Creating the field with information and communication technologies (ICTs). Medicine Anthropology Theory, 6(2).
• Albris, K., Otto, E. I., Astrupgaard, S. L., Gregersen, E. M., Jørgensen, L. S., Jørgensen, O., … & Schønning, S. (2021). A view from anthropology: Should anthropologists fear the data machines?. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211043655.
• Gray, P. A. (2016). Memory, body, and the online researcher: Following Russian street demonstrations via social media. American Ethnologist, 43(3), 500-510.
• Hobbis, S. K., & Hobbis, G. (2024). A Sociotechnical Approach to Smartphone Research: Outline for a Holistic, Qualitative Mobile Method. Media International Australia, 1329878X241253011.
• Palmberger, M. (2025). The Digital Diary: A Mobile, Multimodal, and Participatory Method and Part of Digital Ethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 24, 16094069251329262.
• Pink, S., Horst, H., Lewis, T., Hjorth, L., & Postill, J. (2015). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice.
• Pype, K. (2023). Four Ways of Not Saying Something in Digital Kinshasa: Or, On the Substance of Shadow Conversations. In: Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment and Digital Media. V. Bernal, K. Pype and D. Rodima-Taylor (Eds.). Berghahn, pp. 24-50.

Objectives and competences:

The main aim of the course is to introduce students to the anthropological and interdisciplinary study of technology as a cultural, social and political phenomenon. The primary aim is to develop a broad understanding of how technologies are embedded in social practices and how they are shaped by values, power relations and historical contexts, and how they themselves influence social relations, practices and identities of individuals and groups.

Students will understand:

• How anthropology and STS understand technology not just as a tool, but as something that is actively engaged in people’s relationships, practices and identities.
• How technologies affect inequalities, including in the areas of gender, race and socio-economic class.
• The importance of ethnographic methods in analysing technology in everyday life.

General competences:

• Critical and interdisciplinary thinking about the role of technology in society.
• Independent academic research and interpretation of empirical material.
• Clear and coherent academic writing and discussion.

Subject-specific competences:

• Understanding key anthropological and STS theories related to technology.
• Applying ethnographic methods to the analysis of technological practices.
• Critically evaluating the cultural, ethical, and political implications of technological development.
• Identifying how technologies reflect and shape social categories such as gender, race, and class.

Intended learning outcomes:

After this course the students will be able to:

• analyse technology as part of social practices and cultural values.
• critically compare different anthropological and STS approaches to the study of technology.
• Interpret ethnographic examples in relation to theoretical concepts.
• Present the ethical and political dimensions of technologies of development and their embeddedness in power relations.
• Independently write an analysis of a selected case of technological practice in a broader social context.

Learning and teaching methods:

Types of learning/teaching:

• Frontal teaching
• Independent students work
• e-learning

Teaching methods:

• Explanation
• Conversation/discussion/debate
• Work with texts

Assessment:

• Short written assignments 20 %
• Long written assignments 60 %
• Presentations 20 %