Funded projects
Nano-dev – Nanotechnology for development
Nanotechnology for development is a research project that aims at understanding how nanotechnology can contribute to development. By investigating way people deal with nanotechnology in Kenya, India and the Netherlands, the project will flesh out appropriate ways for governing nanotechnology for development.
Research team: Wiebe E. Bijker, Ragna Zeiss, Charity Urama, Pankaj Sekhsaria, Trust Saidi and Koen Beumer
Type of project: NWO-WOTRO Integrated Programme
More information: www.nano-dev.org
BESSE – Brokering environmentally sustainable sanitation for Europe
BESSE is a collaborative effort of academic, professional and non-governmental organisations. It aims to contribute to the Renewed, Sustainable Development Strategy of the European Union through the enhancement of the links between sanitation policy and research on sustainable sanitation development. The project aims to to establish what obstacles are preventing the dissemination of scientific and technical sanitation information; to identify knowledge brokering (communication) methods that will enable the sanitation sectors to overcome these obstacles; to start a learning process on knowledge brokerage in general, as a tool for the socialisation of Scientific and Technological Research (STR).
Research team: Wiebe E. Bijker and Ragna Zeiss
Type of project: environment sub-theme of the Seventh Framework Programme
More information: http://www.besse-project.info
SET-DEV - Science, Ethics and Technological Responsibility in Developing and Emerging Countries
SET-DEV aims to support the research systems and to encourage the socialisation of scientific and technological research in India and Kenya. Within the term of socialisation, the project involves the social dynamics and processes that are part of scientific and technological research, including various operational and cognitive aspects, which in turn include a wide range of cultural and ethical issues. The project SET-DEV executes a series of activities through study coordination, capacity building, training and awareness raising initiatives
Research team: Wiebe E. Bijker and Ragna Zeiss
Type of project: call by the EC DG RTD on capacity building in developing countries under the Seventh Framework Programme
More information: http://www.set-dev.eu
Complex interactions between international standardization and national innovation projects (NWO project)
ICT networks are increasingly international in nature, which makes it difficult for national governments to influence their development and use. The standards on which they run cater to shared international needs, while at the same time the call for customized, local and flexible network technologies is becoming more urgent. Hence, there is a tension between the desire for standards and stability on the one hand and flexibility and adaptation to local preferences on the other hand. This project investigates how national governments deal with this tension and aims at improving the policy-making strategies that can be employed by national governments to intervene in innovation and standardization processes with a strong international dimension.
Research team: Tineke Egyedi (TU Delft) , Eefje Cleophas, Wiebe Bijker
Sonic skills: sound and listening in science, technology and medicine, 1920s-now
Scholars who emphasize the visual bias in Western culture usually point to science as their favorite example. Doing research seems impossible without using images, graphs and diagrams. Historians and sociologists of science have recently corrected this claim by showing how senses other than seeing, including listening, have been significant in the development of knowledge, notably in the laboratory. The world of science itself, however, still considers listening a less objective entrance into knowledge production than seeing. This program aims to understand the contested position of sonic skills in knowledge production by studying the role of sound and listening in science, technology and medicine.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Karin Bijsterveld, Dr. Melissa van Drie, Dr. Anna Harris, Dr. Stefan Krebs, Joeri Bruyninckx MPhil, Alexandra Supper MA.
Type of project: NWO VICI grant
More information about the project:
Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (output in Sonic Skills),
Selling sound: the standardization of sound in the European car industry and the hidden integration of Europe
This program aims to understand how the standardization of consumer products has contributed to the hidden integration of Europe by examining the history and current practice of sound design in the European car industry.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Karin Bijsterveld, Drs. Eefje Cleophas, Dr. Stefan Krebs, Dr. Gijs Mom
Type of project: NWO Vrije competitie
More information: Prof. Dr. Karin Bijsterveld
Soundscapes of the urban past: staged sound as mediated cultural heritage
This programme focuses on the urban past in terms of its sounds, and on how the dramatization of these sounds articulated changing identities of both the city and its inhabitants between 1875 and 2000. This programme's scholarly aim is to study dramatizations of sound in historical documents, radio plays and films – as mediated cultural heritage – in order to enhance our understanding of the continuity and change in representations of the city, specifically Amsterdam, Berlin and London.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Karin Bijsterveld, Dr. Andreas Fickers, Drs. Annelies Jacobs and Jasper Aalbers MA.
Type of project: NWO-Cultural Dynamics.
More information: Prof. Dr. Karin Bijsterveld
The project Soundscapes has resulted in the installation Soundscapes Amsterdam for the Amsterdam Museum, which can be visited untill December 28, 2013.
Have you ever wondered what Amsterdam sounded like throughout the last century?
On March 28, the Amsterdam Museum presents Soundscapes Amsterdam, an interactive sound installation through which visitors can explore historic changes in the sounds of the city Amsterdam.
George Hendrik Breitner – De Dam, 1898. collection Amsterdam Museum, on loan from Stedelijk Museum. Printed with permission.
Through the installation one can experience sounds that one would hear on the main square in Amsterdam - De Dam - in 1895, 1935 and 2012. Combined with other city’s sounds from the last 150 years, visitors can learn how city dwellers coped with noise and silence and how sounds changed during World War Two.
You can read more about this unique installation here.
Changing platforms of ritualised memory practices. The cultural dynamics of home movies
This project addresses a number of questions dealing with the complex interrelationship between technology, specific user generations and spaces or places of cultural memory production in home movie making and screening. More concretely we are interested in the question how changing technologies of cultural production (film, video or digital camera) have shaped new practices and rituals of memory staging (screening of the films in domestic of public venues) and thereby initiated processes of (re)negotiating user generations and group identities.
Research team: Dr. Andreas Fickers and Dr. Jo Wachelder, in collaboration with Dr. Susan Aasman (UG).
Type of project: NWO Vrije competitie
More information: NWO.nl
EU Screen
The EUscreen Best Practice Network aims at achieving a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material. EUscreen builds a network of content providers, standardisation bodies, television research partners and specific user groups by providing multilingual and multicultural access to television heritage. Andreas Fickers represents Maastricht University as official partner in the project with a 6 month research affiliation. His main task is to develop the prototype of the first electronic journal in European television studies, tentatively called Critical Studies in European Television, and to act as a mediator between the EU-SCREEN project and the European Television History Network which he is coordinating together with Sonja de Leeuw (Utrecht University).
Research team: Dr. Andreas Fickers, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Sonja de Leeuw (Utrecht University).
Type of project: EU Content Plus Programme
More information: www.euscreen.eu
The history of Solvay SA, 1863-2013
Book length study of the 150-years history of the Belgian Solvay company (chemicals, plastics, pharmaceuticals). To be published by Cambridge University Press.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Ernst Homburg, in collaboration with Dr. Kenneth Bertrams and Nicolas Coupain (Universite Libre de Bruxelles).
Type of project: Contract research.
More information: Prof.dr. Ernst Homburg
Europe goes critical
Europe goes critical looks at the expansion of infrastructures in Europe both through the interconnection across national borders and through interconnections of different kinds of infrastructures with one another. Those connections created new forms of interdependencies and shared vulnerabilities among nations in Europe. The project inquires how actors of different kinds have interpreted such interdependencies and vulnerabilities, and developed institutions for handling them.
Research coordinator: Dr. Anique Hommels
Type of project: a Collaborative Research Project (CRP) within the EUROCORES programme Inventing Europe, funded through the European Science Foundation (ESF)
More information: www.eurocrit.eu/
Monitoring C2000
In this project we monitored the evaluation of a large infrastructural project in the Netherlands: C2000. C2000 is a digital communication system for the emergency services. The C2000 project was concluded with an evaluation report, analyzing how the project developed, its milestones, and what lessons could be learnt for future infrastructure projects. Our role was to monitor the research and writing process of the final evaluation report.
Coordinator: Anique Hommels
Responsible food innovation
Thus far responsible innovation restricts itself to taking into account negative impacts of emerging technologies on safety, health and environment. But many technologies also impact our culture, morals and politics. The public holds technologists accountable for these “soft impacts”, but the latter typically feel unable, or unwilling, to integrate those impacts in their research, judging them non-quantifiable, controversial, or, at best, private. This project seeks to improve the dialogue between science and society by investigating these soft impacts and their integration into innovation.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Tsjalling Swierstra and Dirk Haen, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Hedwig te Molder (Wageningen) and Dr. Petra Sneijder (Wageningen)
Type of project: NWO Responsible innovation.
More information: Prof.dr. Tsjalling Swierstra
Het grote nano-onderzoek – publieksonderzoek naar de gevolgen van nanotechnologie.
For this book the thoughts, expectations and opinions about nanotechnology amongst the Dutch population were investigated. The project was financed by the Commissie Maatschappelijke Dialoog Nanotechnology.
Research team: Prof.dr. Tsjalling Swierstra, in collaboration with Dr. Lidwien van de Wijngaert and Aurora Hilbrink (University of Twente).
Type of project: book project
More information: Nanopodium.nl (pdf)
Ethics on the laboratory floor - Towards a cooperative ethics for the development of responsible technology
This book presents the problems and debates that form the background of the establishment a new field: ethical Technology Assessment (eTA). This emerging discipline aims to transcend the limits of both ethics and the versions of TA developed in STS. It aims to offer normative focus and justifications that are practical for decision makers, because it starts from a realistic view of the process of research into -and design of- new technologies.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Tsjalling Swierstra, in collaboration with Dr. Simone van der Burg (Radboud University).
Type of project: book project
More information: Prof.dr. Tsjalling Swierstra
European Risk Governance
This project aimed at an empirically informed contribution to theories of European risk governance. We investigated the role of uncertainty and drift (slowly and unconsciously deviating from the rules) in the Dutch way of dealing with the Seveso II Directive. The Seveso II Directive is a European directive aimed at minimizing the risk of disasters with chemical substances.
Research team: Prof.dr.ir. Marjolein van Asselt , Drs. Tessa Fox, and Dr. Esther Versluis
Selling genetic tests online: user perspectives on direct to consumer psychiatric genetic tests
This project will provide an empirical base for examining societal impacts of two technological developments which are now beginning to intersect: genetic testing and the internet. Specifically, the research will examine user perspectives (affected individuals, family members, advocates and health care providers) on direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing using existing and imminent genetic tests for psychiatric disorders as an informative case study.
Research team: Prof. Dr. Sally Wyatt, Dr. Anna Harris, in collaboration with Dr. Susan Kelly (University of Exeter).
Type of project: NWO and the British ESRC
More information: Genomics Network
Bio-objects and their boundaries
Europe seeks to become the most dynamic knowledge-based economy of the globe. The production and circulation of bio-objects, such as stem cells, chimera, tissue samples or genetically modified organisms, play a key part in this endeavour. This project seeks to develop novel interdisciplinary tools in order to enhance our understanding of bio-objects, their production and circulation in time and in space, and their governance.
Research team: Dr. Ragna Zeiss
Type of project: COST Action
More information: http://www.univie.ac.at/bio-objects
