The Chair

 

The Chair of Society and Technology is following two aims. Firstly, it deals with the interrelations and foundation of society and technology. Secondly, the co-productive evolution of innovations and connected risks are examined from a transdisciplinary perspective.

The chair is also involved in actively shaping co-productive forms of innovation. A major task of the chair is to develop, to offer and to spread “expertise in contextualization”. Core working areas are Science and Technology Studies, Technology Assessment, research on inter- and transdisciplinary innovation processes and theories of modern societies.

By combining these different streams, we get not only a detailed and reflexive understanding of innovation and technology development but also a better understanding of their social, cultural and political framings.

We are working on two different tasks. The first task concerns the analysis and shaping of transdisciplinary spaces of innovation (co-design of innovation in research, companies and real-world labs). In this context, new theoretical and methodological tools for the analysis of knowledge and transformations are being developed.

For doing so, we cooperate in an interdisciplinary manner with our HumTec colleagues and further departments and faculties of RWTH Aachen University, but also with a wide network of partners from science and research, politics, industry and the economy, and, last but not least, further members and stakeholders of civil society. In this way we aim at opening new and concrete routes for the participative shaping of innovation.

A second task of the chair is work on a sociological theory of (social) fields which allows a better understanding of the political and democratic implications of transforming innovation processes.