Expanding Cultures of Research and Governance in the Innovation Era
NINA FRAHM
My short-term fellowship kicked off with a KHK c:o/re workshop exploring the 2025 thematic field ‘expanded science and technology studies (STS)’. As Stefan Böschen explained at the beginning of the session, key questions guiding work in this field were how to study and make sense of increasingly hybrid forms of knowledge production in contemporary research and technological development. Expanding well beyond traditional cultures of science and engineering, research today reflects an imperative to integrate heterogeneous actors, diverse epistemic backgrounds and material practices, and a plurality of economic and political interests. On the one hand, this hybridization of research is driven by expectations for research to become more innovative – to produce new knowledge and technological tools at ever-greater speed and scale. On the other hand, it is a response to a crisis of scientific authority and narratives of technoscientific progress – producing corollary demands to democratize research through greater inclusion of society, stakeholders, and the wider public. During the workshop, we discussed different avenues through which STS can study, meaningfully engage in, and, perhaps, even contribute to critique of this trend and its dynamics. Might expanded forms of scientific and technological production also require expansion of analytical perspectives, methodological tools, types of collaboration, and vocabularies of critique in STS?
Nina Frahm
Nina Frahm is a postdoc at the Department for Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Grounded in Science and Technology Studies (STS), she critically examines policies and governance approaches for innovation across countries, institutions, and technoscientific domains.
During my lecture at KHK c:o/re a few hours later, I argued that STS research into changing cultures of technoscience indeed should expand to studying equally important transformations in the governance of science and technology – in fact, changes in one rarely occur without changes in the other. My research over the last couple of years has closely followed recent shifts in the ways public policies frame the governance of technoscience, and in particular, which frameworks and instruments have been put into practice to achieve a greater inclusion of society in innovation processes. In the past, science and technology policy emphasized a ‘social contract with science’ and a hands-off, hidden role of the state in the production and governance of technological innovation1. Today, however, we witness governments and public institutions openly embracing innovation imperatives and policies to support the development of innovative technologies beyond science alone. Yet, promises on part of policy to achieve social progress and wellbeing through investments in innovation also face the challenge to legitimize public investments in high-risk, highly uncertain research and development. A key task for the ‘entrepreneurial state’2 is hence to produce visions of innovation as a res publica – a thing that can be produced and governed by society and according to its rules.
A new spirit of technoscience
The public turn to innovation in the 21st century is characterized by a ‘new spirit of technoscience’3 in which 20th century governance paradigms are turned upside down. Rather than following linear models of innovation, ‘techno-fix’ logics, and ideals for the self-governance of research and development, policies advance frames of technoscientific governance in which the public is given a key role to control innovation pathways and to fix potential problems for society upstream4. The new spirit advances a variety of frameworks to integrate the public in the development and governance of innovation, such as Bioethics, ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’, Open Science, or ‘Mission oriented Innovation’. Different tools are mobilized by policy to put such frameworks into practice, ranging from ethics committees and expert advisory boards to public engagement exercises, citizen deliberations, or co-creation processes, to name but a few.
While all these tools are geared toward ‘opening up’ technoscientific development and governance, each of them follows a particular idea of who the public is and why it should be included, how it can participate and be represented in technoscientific development and governance, through which means, and for what ends. As my research on the governance of emerging neurotechnologies5 and AI6 has shown, differences in governance frameworks and tools can be traced to culturally situated ideals of democracy that vary greatly across contexts. For instance, US approaches to innovation governance are marked by liberal-technocratic ideals of democracy as deliberations around new technologies are often delegated to experts from science, the law, or philosophy. Here, responsibility for good governance of innovation pathways is located within the individual researcher, engineer, and end-user. The EU, in turn, has experimented with more direct and deliberative forms of democracy in which the public participates directly in settling norms and principles and in which governance responsibility is collectivized along the entire innovation process, including public institutions, scientists, actors in R&D, entrepreneurs, as well as citizens. Whereas both approaches follow long-held scripts, or fictions7, of democratic procedures and practices, they also considerably re-order the relationship between publics and technoscience, particularly when it comes to the distribution of authority to reason on emerging technologies and to take decisions for their governance.
Repertoires for expansion
Expansions in the role of the state and public institutions in the production of innovation are, hence, closely related to expanding the governance of technoscience to new types of publics, forms of expertise, and practices rooted in situated imaginaries of democratic sovereignty and self-rule. To study this dynamic relationship between changing forms of technoscientific production and governance, STS offers the rich analytical language of ‘interactional co-production’ which has been tried and tested in numerous case-studies that illustrate the complexity and diversity of accommodations between science, technology, and society8. This analytical approach allows us to symmetrically trace how changes in the ways knowledge is produced and technology developed – in changing epistemic and material order – simultaneously reflect changes in democratic order regarding the power to reason on and govern science and technology in the name of society.
Such analysis encourages us to direct our critical eye beyond the discourses and practices of scientists and engineers to those places and settings which tend to be overlooked in public debates and appraisal of innovation, such as ethics advisory bodies or citizen panels. Next to interrogating their role in the co-production of socio-technical imaginaries, STS can expand analysis to conceptualizing their importance in re-producing imaginaries of democracy and in re-configuring them for the innovation era. As Jan-Peter Voß has argued, “a lot of more work is required to create robust links between empirical studies of how public engagement is conceptualized and done in various ways and the basic presuppositions and tenets of political theories describing specific ways of how ‘society’ or ‘the people’ as a whole become articulated and how the public speaks.”9 In a time where diagnoses of a ‘crisis of democracy’ are permeating the headlines and a shared sense of democratic values seems to be waning, such work is ever more important. But it can also feel uncomfortable as it contributes to further pluralizing, rather than stabilizing, taken for granted understandings of democracy and democratic practice. Doing this work requires institutional spaces that are open for expansion – spaces like KHK c:o/re where interdisciplinarity, curiosity, and intellectual courage are cultivated and cherished. In the workshop, during my lecture, and in different encounters with fellows, I have experienced how ‘expanded STS’ is not just a scholarly ambition but a mode of doing research and of thinking together that is already very much alive. And although every expansion has a limit, I look forward to further stretching it with colleagues at KHK c:o/re and beyond.
References
1 Pfotenhauer, S. M., and Juhl, J. (2017). Innovation and the Political State: Beyond the Myth of Technologies and Markets. In Critical Studies of Innovation: Alternative Approaches to the Pro-Innovation Bias, edited by Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck, 68–94. Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar. 68–94. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785367229.00012 
.; Block, F. (2008). Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States. Politics & Society, 36(2), 169-206. https://doi.org/10.1177/003232920831873 .
2 Mazzucato, M. (2018). The entrepreneurial state. Penguin Books.
3 Doezema, T. and Frahm, N. (2023). The New Spirit of Technoscience: Reformulating STS Critique and Engagement. Journal of Responsible Innovation, Vol. 10(1). doi: 10.1080/23299460.2023.2281112
4 Frahm, N., Doezema, T., & Pfotenhauer, S. (2021). Fixing Technology with Society: The Coproduction of Democratic Deficits and Responsible Innovation at the OECD and the European Commission. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 47(1), 174-216. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243921999100.
5 Frahm, N. (2022) Soft Constitutions: Co-producing Neuro-Innovation and Society in the US, EU, and OECD. PhD Dissertation, Technical University Munich.
6 Frahm, N. and Schiœlin, K. (2023) Toward an ‘Ever Closer Union’: The Making of AI-Ethics in the EU. STS Encounters, Vol. 15(2).
7 Ezrahi, Y. (2012) Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8 Jasanoff, S. (2005) Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton Unviersity Press; Laurent, B. (2022) European objects: the troubled dreams of harmonization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; Parthasarathy, S. (2017). Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226437996.
9 Voß, Jan-Peter (2019) Re-making the modern constitution: The case for an observatory on public engagement practices. In: Simon, D., Kuhlmann, S., Stamm, I., Canzler, W. (eds.) (2019): Handbook of Science and Public Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
A Field Trip to the Wandering Mines: Strange Ecologies and the Green Work of Environmental Mitigation
MATTHEW N. EISLER
In the Rhenish mining-industrial complex, the past, present, and future of geological and human time intersect. Over 30 million years, intertwined processes of evolutionary biology and geo-biochemistry produced thick seams of brown coal in the region now known as the Cologne Bay (Kölner Bucht) that began to be intensively mined from open pits from the late eighteenth century. As elsewhere, coal-based industrial enterprises enabled asymmetrical social development and came with environmental costs that human beings sought to mitigate with increasingly elaborate infrastructures of waste management. The resulting hybrid ecosystems exist in a state of fragile balance that requires constant effort to maintain, as a mid-May field trip to the Garzweiler and Hambach mines illustrated.
Matthew N. Eisler
c:o/re Fellow 01/25 – 12/25
Matthew N. Eisler is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. He researches how ideology and policy inform practices of energy and materials conversion and shape social relations and environments.
I am a historian of clean and green technology and have become interested in the historical sociology of the “green work” of environmental mitigation, a project I am developing as a KHK fellow. I was curious to hear the perspectives of my companions on this question. The field trip was led by the retired hydrogeologist H. Georg Meiners, joined by Lars M. Blank, head of RWTH Aachen University’s Institute of Applied Microbiology, and Victor de Lorenzo, RWTH Kármán-Fellow and professor of research in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he heads the Laboratory of Environmental Synthetic Biology at the National Center for Biotechnology. Georg spent much of his career investigating how the lignite mines affect local water quantity and quality while Lars and Victor research microorganisms capable of metabolizing industrial waste. They were eager to get out of the laboratory and lecture hall and into the field to see just what the microbial world is up against.
What we found was a vast “organic machine,” a term coined by the historian Richard White to connote large-scale industrial infrastructure in its ecological context. If the history of environmental mitigation can be characterized by a single phenomenon, it is ‘displacement:’ solve one problem and another pops up elsewhere unexpectedly. In the Rhenish mining complex (Reinisches Braunkohlerevier), we witness a cascading series of displacements. A key set of problems issue from the high sulphur content of lignite. In the 1970s and 1980s, lignite-burning German industry emitting sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides caused acid rain in faraway Sweden. Fitting power plants with scrubber technology fixed that problem but did nothing to mitigate emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide. Moreover, sulphuric mine tailings can acidify soil and ground water. To neutralize this form of pollution, miners mix lime into the spoil.
Managing such problems is complicated by the vast scale of open cast mining. Garzweiler is an artificial canyon, and canyons can shape airflow and create their own weather systems. Georg had warned us to bundle up because it would be windy, and at Garzweiler, that wind is harvested as a resource. Energy planners have ringed the mine-canyon with dozens of giant wind turbines, exploiting an unintended ecological consequence of this industrial enterprise.
These winds cause numerous accidents on nearby motorways and also stir up particulates, a less-discussed problem of open cast mining, observes Lars. At Garzweiler’s eastern rim, where overburden is slowly processed into massive lime-laced mesas by giant earthmovers, a bouquet of hoses spray thousands of liters of water a minute in an effort to tamp down dust. But it is impossible to water all of the 40 square kilometers of the mine’s operating area. Scrubby vegetation growing atop the reclamation mesas fixes some of the particulate matter into place and I wonder aloud if this brush belt will grow into a green lung. Georg responds that this proto-forest is only an interim measure that will disappear according to the master mitigation plan of the terraformers of the Cologne Bay. From the 2030s on, the mine-canyons will be decommissioned and filled with water diverted from the Rhine, creating deep lakes in a project that could take until the end of the century and has many unknowns.
A less visible but equally problematic effect of the mine is on the realm of subterranean water. Garzweiler is surrounded by a vast network of wells, pipes, and pumps working constantly to lower the water table to enable coal excavation. This is a delicate operation. If the pumped water is not properly reinfiltrated back into the ground, says Georg, local forests, streams, lakes, and the underground springs for which the Aachen area is famous could be damaged or even destroyed.
The Cologne Bay is also a rich and important agricultural region that has become contested terrain in an unequal clash between industrialism and eco-activism. For a century, the mining enterprises followed the coal seams, and their historical progress, as depicted on topographic maps, resemble channels carved by giant coal-hungry worms munching their way through the landscape. These “wandering mines” have destroyed a number of farm communities in their path.
We visit the village of Keyenberg, a flashpoint in high-profile regional demonstrations against mine operator RWE in 2021 that became a monument to the uneven pace of environmental progress. Keyenberg is a ghost village. From the mid-2010s, it was slated to be engulfed by the Garzweiler mine and began to depopulate but when energy planners decided to phase out lignite, the abandoned village was left intact. Today, the place has the uncanny feel of a Chernobyl-like exclusion zone. A sign on one house reads “zu verschenken,” or in English, “to give away.” Such houses can be obtained for free, at the price of fixing them up and living near a windy and dusty mine-canyon. Georg says there is talk of housing war refugees here, and amidst the boarded-up buildings there are signs of life. One person, perched on a scaffold, repairs a house that boasts a well-tended hydrangea garden, activities suggestive of yet another form of green work heralding Keyenberg’s possible revival, or reincarnation.
The ongoing management of some of the wandering mine’s wastes, the conversion of its windy microclimate into clean energy, and the gradual reclamation of a portion of its disrupted hinterlands poses the conundrum of how to interpret the co-construction of such awesome desolations and their ingenious eco-infrastructures of life support. Contemporary environmental discourse imposes a dualistic moral-ethical framework of good (green) and bad (non-green) behaviors against which we are supposed to judge ourselves and others, declare a position as optimist or pessimist, and offer normative visions in a calculus that, as some argue, has centered generalized global processes over diverse local experiences of environments and environmental despoliation.
The case of the Rhenish coal belt calls attention to a particular set of conflicts, contradictions, and puzzles, and what the environmentalist Val Plumwood called “shadow spaces,” occluded from our subjective ecological visions, that invite further investigation. Human history would seem to vitiate the prospect of circumspect do-no-harm environmental activism advocated by the philosopher Arne Naess. In the imagined perspective of geological time, human beings might be perceived as acting in a near-simultaneous spasm of furious environment-altering activity.
It seems to me that the path to the kind of wise interventions Naess had in mind starts in gaining awareness of the perversities and paradoxes of myriad local projects of environmental mitigation. Understanding how human beings build organic machines like Garzweiler and its environs, learn how these strange ecologies operate as amalgams of human and natural agency, and live with the consequences might be a modest but necessary prelude to deciding the next set of mitigating moves.
I thank Georg Meiners for hosting and guiding this event and reviewing a draft of this essay, and Victor de Lorenzo and Lars Blank for enriching the experience with their insights and companionship.
Event Announcement: Aachen AI Week 2025
Next week, from May 19 to 23, the Aachen AI Week 2025 will take place, organized by the Center for Artificial Intelligence (AI Center) at RWTH Aachen University.
Make sure you don’t miss the many different activities: For example, the discussion “AI & Diversity” on Wednesday, May 21 from 6 to 8 pm in the OecherLab, moderated by KHK c:o/re director Gabriele Gramelsberger.
AI experts such as Saskia Nagel and Holger Hoos will discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing our society and how we can shape a fair future with AI.
More details about the event and the full program of the AI Week can be found on their website here.
Melodic Pigments – An Experiment on the Relationship between Sound and Color
Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of modeling and replicating human sensory associations? This question was explored at the KHK c:o/re on April 28, 2025, as part of the science-art installation experiment “Melodic Pigments: Exploring New Synesthesia” created by the Japanese media artist Yasmin Vega (Tokyo University of the Arts) in cooperation with KHK c:o/re alumni fellow Masahiko Hara (Institute of Science Tokyo).
The goal of the installation experiment is to explore the relationship between sound and color through the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which one sensory perception involuntarily triggers another. The primary focus is on chromesthesia, a form of auditory synesthesia in which sounds evoke the perception of colors.
During the performance, Yasmin Vega played electronic music using live programming, while an AI model trained on sound-color associations predicted and visualized corresponding colors in real time. The AI model used in this project was trained on subjective data reflecting Yasmin Vega’s personal associations between sound and color. Throughout the performance, the AI processed incoming sounds every three seconds and determined the corresponding colors based on the pre-trained data, thereby creating a fluid interplay between auditory and visual elements. The colors chosen by the AI were shown on a series of hanging light tubes and as morphing pattern on a computer screen.
The installation experiment seeks to explore the AI’s ability to model and replicate human sensory associations. The focus is on exploring internal visualization processes and the sensory capabilities of machines. Yasmin Vega’s performance demonstrated that the AI was able to recognize and replicate human perceptions while generating color-sound associations that matched the artist’s expectations.
This installation experiment builds on previous works on the integration of artistic strategies into science and technology that KHK c:o/re alumni fellow Masahiko Hara has engaged in during his fellowship. In January 2024, he presented the art installation “Unfelt Threshold” developed in collaboration with the artist Aoi Suwa that explored the perceptual capabilities of machines in response to unpredictable visual stimuli. Through these experiments, Masahiko Hara aims to open up new perspectives at the intersection of materials science and nanotechnology within scientific engineering. The interplay between science and artistic practice reflects a central research interest of the KHK c:o/re, which investigates how artistic methods can contribute to epistemic questions within an expanded framework of science and technology through performances such as “Melodic Pigments”.
Interview with Yasmin Vega
How do you perceive sound and color?
When I listen to a high-pitched sound, I imagine yellow. When I listen to a dark sound, like dark bass, I also imagine a dark color, like dark green or like deep purple. The volume of the sound also changes how I perceive it. If I listen to a loud sound, I imagine red. And even if I listen to the same melody, if it’s played with different instruments, I also imagine a different color.
What surprised you most about the visualizations of the AI?
What surprised me the most was how often the AI’s visualization matched the color that I actually imagine when I’m performing. And it almost felt like the AI could understand my personal sense of color. From this whole performance, I realized that how useful it can be to work with AI when it comes to expressing something that’s really personal and hard to explain to others or share with others.
What do you think about AI and art working together? Where do you see challenges?
I wanted to use the AI just as a tool in my artworks. I felt that if I collected the training data by myself and developed the model by myself, then using AI is just like using the tool. So, the final artwork was really my work. And I didn’t feel like just writing the prompt and letting the AI to generate the image is really artwork. That’s why I originally wanted to control the AI as much as possible, but now I feel a little bit more relaxed about it. Now I’m looking for the unpredictable results that come when I can’t freely control the AI. I can say that I’m not so cautious anymore.
One challenge I see is the amount of the data. This time I only used 300 samples to train the AI model. There are so many sounds in the world, so it’s basically impossible to cover all of it. But improving the model’s accuracy doesn’t automatically mean that the artwork itself gets better. So, I think the creative value comes from something more than just how smart or how accurate the AI is.
Photos and video by Jana Hambitzer
Edited Volume out now!
We are pleased to announce the publication of “Making Media Futures. Machine Visions and Technological Imaginations” by Routledge. The book is edited by KHK c:o/re team members Phillip H. Roth, Ana María Guzmán Olmos, Alin Olteanu and Stefan Böschen.
Making Media Futures offers a multi-perspectival exploration of how imaginaries and knowledge of the future are constructed in and through various media.
The volume addresses the discursive dimensions of imaginaries and future visions as well as the impact of technological, material, and cultural conditions on the propagation of future discourses through media. Providing both theoretically detailed and empirically rich investigations, the contributions offer a wide range of cases spanning the century from the end of World War II until today and looking at examples from the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Global North. Bringing together scholars in media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the history and philosophy of technology, the chapters discuss future visions and imaginations of quantum computing, the uncertainty and impact of AI-based text-to-image generation, the ideology behind 5G telecommunication standards, imaginaries of the Internet of Things, transmedia strategies in global and local climate protests, how broadcast radio was implicated in the evangelical mission imaginary, and how early visions of automating scholarly information management shaped standards and ideals of academia. The volume thus complements existing approaches and analytical frameworks for the study of imaginaries and futures discourses with perspectives that are sensitive to the plurality of media-specific conditions and technologies.
The book will interest students and scholars working in media studies, STS, history and philosophy as well as at the intersection of engineering, humanities and social sciences, on matters such as sustainability, ethics, and responsible innovation.
Have a look at the book on the publisher’s website here.
Second Funding Phase for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re)
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has renewed funding for the KHK c:o/re at RWTH Aachen University for four more years.
The KHK c:o/re is an international Center for Advanced Studies in philosophy, sociology and history of science and technology and the first Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at a technical university. Since 2021, it has explored the transformation of research cultures in science and technology and develops a methodological approach to strengthen the integration of the various disciplines in science and technology studies. This takes place in a close exchange between the humanities and social sciences and the life, natural, technical and engineering sciences.
Beginning in May 2025, the center will start its second funding phase under the direction of Professor Gabriele Gramelsberger and Professor Stefan Böschen with continued support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
“It’s just wonderful that the KHK gives us a platform that allows us such unusual freedom in our research,” says Gabriele Gramelsberger. “This has to do with a number of important boundary conditions. On the one hand, generous funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research allows us to invite a large number of fellows from all over the world every year to work with us on fundamental questions in science. Second, we have a great team that not only supports the work but also enables us to work together on our research goals. Finally, we receive exceptional support from the Rectorate of RWTH Aachen University, which regards the work of the Kolleg as an important asset for its strategy for excellence.”
The overall aim of the center is to investigate the impact of digitalization and globalization on contemporary research cultures, and to develop a theory of “cultures of research” from a situated, historical, and comparative perspective.
In the second funding phase, the basic research question is to what extent digitalization and globalization as universal drivers of transformation set in motion dynamics of standardization of science and “research cultures” – or whether the diversity of research cultures and the varieties of science are not increased precisely by digitalization and globalization. To address this question, the central concepts of “digitality/complexity,” “globality/varieties of science,” and “expanded science and technology studies” will be explored in three research lines in collaboration with international fellows.
“We can look forward to four more exciting years,” says Stefan Böschen. “We will certainly cultivate even more freedom for individual and joint research than we have done so far. In addition, the Kolleg allows us to further develop and strengthen our international networks related to our research topics. In this way, we hope not only to achieve insightful research results, but also to support the development of a special epistemic culture at our University.”
An interview with Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen looking back on the past funding phase and reflecting on the goals and expectations for the second phase can be found on our blog.
“We can look forward to four more exciting years” – Interview with Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) at RWTH Aachen University will begin its second funding phase in May 2025. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will fund the center for another four years. With the start of the second phase, KHK c:o/re directors Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen look back, reflect on the achievements and developments of the past four years, and set out the goals and expectations for the coming years.
Looking back over the past four years: What were the highlights of the first funding phase?
It is already a highlight that c:o/re is the first Käte Hamburger Kolleg at a technical university and will probably remain the only one. It is also the only center for advanced studies in history, philosophy, and sociology of science and technology worldwide. The first funding phase was a development phase. This development has been successfully completed. We got a wonderful location for this Kolleg on Theaterstraße and the best possible team. We have had great fellows in all four cohorts, with whom we have developed exciting intellectual perspectives in very different ways. In addition, we have been able to organize a large number of events, networks, and collaborations both within and outside RWTH. Therefore, there are plenty of highlights to report on from the first funding phase.
What are the lessons learned, especially with regard to the interdisciplinary exchange with the fellows?
Experience shows how demanding this collaboration ultimately is, but also how fruitful. You wouldn’t necessarily expect different branches of the humanities and social sciences to work together with natural sciences and technology, but they do. We also work intensively with our colleagues from the natural sciences and engineering. That’s why we’ve developed various formats like lab talks to make these collaborations easier. We’ve also developed projects with some fellows that are now being carried out in cooperation with the Human Technology Center (HumTec). The most important lesson learned, however, is certainly that this type of collaboration not only requires more time and a more relaxed attitude, but also that specific opportunities should be created so that the work can lead to joint results. Goal-orientation fuels interdisciplinary cooperation. In the “Software Group” (a working group at the KHK c:o/re – editor’s note), for example, an article was written with many fellows from a wide area of disciplines and published in Nature Computational Science.
What do you enjoy most about working at the KHK c:o/re?
It’s just wonderful that the KHK gives us a platform that allows us such unusual freedom in our research. This has to do with a number of important boundary conditions. On the one hand, generous funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) allows us to invite a large number of fellows from all over the world every year to work with us on fundamental questions in science. Second, we have a great team that not only supports the work but also enables us to work together on our research goals. Finally, we receive exceptional support from the Rectorate of RWTH Aachen University, which regards the work of the Kolleg as an important asset for its strategy for excellence.
What are the goals of the second funding phase?
In the second funding phase, we are taking seriously the feedback from last year’s evaluation of our research group. The evaluation went very well fostering our research profile more strongly. This will enable us to produce results of even greater relevance and visibility. Against this background, we are pursuing two lines of research, one dealing with the digitization of research (“Varieties of the Digital”) and the other with the cosmopolitization of science (“Varieties of Science”). These lines of inquiry are not only significant in their own right, but also allow us to advance the program of an integrated interdisciplinary methodology of science studies itself, which we bundle under the heading “Expanded STS”. Furthermore, we will link “Expanded STS” to the historical reflection of computing, philosophy of science, and STS. We are working on two book series. One will consist of three volumes dealing with the history, philosophy, and sociology of computing and computational science. The other will consist of two volumes on Expanded STS.
What are you looking forward to?
We can look forward to four more exciting years. We will certainly cultivate even more freedom for individual and joint research than we have done so far. In addition, the Kolleg allows us to further develop and strengthen our international networks related to our research topics. In this way, we hope not only to achieve insightful research results, but also to support the development of a special epistemic culture at our University. This is based on the ideal of tailor-made, integrated, interdisciplinary research practices for understanding science itself, but also for finding more targeted solutions to collective problems.
What challenges do you see in the current research landscape and how does the KHK c:o/re address them?
There are a number of significant changes in the research landscape. These can be described using the triad of transformation, transformation of science, and transformative research. These changes challenge our self-image as researchers, but also the institutionalized self-understanding of science. Although science represents an institutionalized special space for the production of epistemically sound knowledge, it is also increasingly caught up in the maelstrom of contemporary transformations. Making these transformations analyzable in terms of their structure and dynamics is the central concern of our research at the Kolleg.
What is your current research focus and how does it relate to your work at the KHK?
Gabriele Gramelsberger: My research focuses on a long-term narrative of the digitization of science as part of the philosophy of computer science. The history of computer science and computational science on the one hand and current developments towards AI on the other are linked to better understand today’s “digitality”. In my view, digitality began long before the invention of the digital computer in the 1940s. Digitality is the result of the operationalization of the mind of modern philosophy in the 18th century. In the 19th century, mathematics took over, and in the 20th century, engineering took over. However, with this broader perspective, we can better integrate the humanities and social sciences into the current understanding of the digital, which is dominated by science and technology. Above all, we need to better understand the cultural impact of software, which has become the general infrastructure of research and everyday life. Its cultural impact is based on the fact that programming has introduced a new and very powerful way of using written language that not only describes operations but also executes them. Nevertheless, it is a product of written language that is worthy of being archived as cultural heritage and researched by historians, philosophers and sociologists of science and technology.
Stefan Böschen: My research focuses on a wide range of issues in the sociology of science and expanded STS (science and technology studies). Of particular importance are the different forms of collaborative research in a variety of settings. These typically relate to a wide range of fields of innovation and transformation (from neuromorphic computing to a DC-driven energy transition). In this context, concepts of research infrastructures (such as living labs) or those of the analysis of innovation and transformation processes (such as innovation ecosystems) can be further developed. This also creates highly productive new interfaces with research at the Kolleg. For example, the form and dynamics of living labs can be examined in their region-specific differences and thus investigated with regard to the differences brought about by varieties of science (cultural-institutional varieties of scientificity).
What is your “culture of research”? How would you describe the way you conduct research?
Gabriele Gramelsberger: My research culture combines epistemic and historical research in order to better understand current developments. The historical dimension encompasses a wide range of interdisciplinary practices and aspects that I am interested in. Therefore, the Kolleg is the perfect place for me to live my research culture.
Stefan Böschen: My research culture can be characterized by the combination of engineering (I am a trained chemical engineer) and sociology. This has not only given me a keen interest in technology assessment and science and technology studies, but also a great enjoyment of interdisciplinary collaboration at the interfaces between very different disciplines. The productive connection between the various disciplines of science studies plays a particularly inspiring role for me.
The interview was conducted by Jana Hambitzer.
Quo vadis, Cultures of Research?
ALIN OLTEANU AND THE C:O/RE TEAM
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) celebrated itself, as it completed the first 4-year cycle of funding and is now successfully entering a second funding cycle. The center is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within its framework program for the humanities and social sciences “Shaping the Future”. On March 25-27, 2025, we were delighted to get together for a conference targeted on the specific but encompassing theme of this center, namely Cultures of Research, which, we dare say, has recently become a more prominent academic topic due to the center’s efforts.
Who are we? All of us – c:o/re team members and fellows, both current and alumni, with a scientific advisory board that has steered the center’s activities. Almost all c:o/re fellows, who have carried out research here over four years, were present. This enabled a fascinating, for us, intersectional and inter-paradigmatic academic dialogue, the kind that makes the object of Cultures of Research. Chaired by the c:o/re team, fellows and scientific advisory board members have presented their research in approximately 40 talks. It was a most enjoyable opportunity for us to discuss, in hindsight, what emerged from four years of sustained academic work, having started from scratch, and how we see the center evolving in the future.
Alin Olteanu
Alin Olteanu is an Associate Professor of Semiotics at Shanghai International Studies University. Until July 2024, he worked as a a postdoctoral researcher and publications coordinator at the KHK c:o/re.
Many of us, team members and alumni fellows, deem the conference not just useful, but necessary. c:o/re has become an important dimension in the work of several of us, intellectually and institutionally. As such, gathering altogether is as important as the regular meeting of many themed academic associations. c:o/re has opened new career opportunities and perspectives for several of us. The center was formative and instrumental in the professional development of many, not just fostering the next step on a linear trajectory, such as from postdoc to tenure, but also enabling shifts in research focus, such as from engineering to science and technology studies. A small minority of alumni fellows has even found long-term academic placement at RWTH Aachen University. Even for such colleagues, who never fully left the center, the conference was needed, to reconnect with others. Many remark that it was particularly interesting to have the chance to dialog with the scientific advisory board in a collective, transparent and friendly setting.
c:o/re directors Professors Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen started off the conference, welcoming what was a heterogenous but familiar gathering. They shared their views on the first four years of this center, the main research topics that channel its work and how these evolved. This ushered in the first keynote, “Historicizing Epistemology” by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, a fitting way to start off a Cultures of Research conference, setting the optics for further conversation.
The conference was structured thematically in eight panels under three main c:o/re study foci, as follows. To address the theme of Change of research practices, we organized the panels Dealing with Complexity and Digitalization of Science. The theme Organizational transformations in science was addressed through panels on Lifelikeness, “Expanded STS” & Euregio, Freedom of Research, Art and Research. The Historical and intercultural comparison of varieties of science was organized into the panels Historicizing Science and Varieties of Science. This thematic organization results from a dialectics that is both top-down and bottom-up, to follow the research center’s rationale and mission, which have been channeled, in time, through the research it produced, one step at a time.
Being part of the c:o/re team, we feel privileged to be in a position to listen to the various studies that have emerged from this research center, observing how they have shaped the center and how its entailed research topics have changed over time. To illustrate, for someone who has been a part of this four-year effort throughout, it was fascinating to listen to dialogues among the scientific advisory board with and across four generations of fellows, who seldomly knew each other. This was not just a meeting of individual scholars, but of academic groups that have crystallized during their respective fellowships, having each developed their research subculture. In this exercise, we saw first-hand the importance of institutional academic funding structured in this Käte Hamburger Kolleg format. Until now, we have worked with these scholars individually and in well-focused formats, such as thematically organized fellow cohorts.
Our festive conference opened the doors to intersectional dialogue, releasing the, however interdisciplinary, strictly focused work of individuals and clusters within c:o/re into a productive and creative chaos. As some fellows attest, while at first glimpse the range of topics brought together under the roof of the center, as seen in this conference, may seem unrelated, they epistemologically connect very well. It is such facilitating of interdisciplinary research that positioned some fellows to discover that the issues they tackle are of interest beyond the disciplinary confines within which they each operate.
We see c:o/re having enabled new and unexpected quo vadis reflections on Cultures of Research, something we can observe regarding the topic of “Expanded STS”, a c:o/re coinage that is drawing growing attention, as an anticipating consideration on scientific and technological futures. Actually, we contend that the conference panel dedicated to Expanded STS demonstrated how much STS is shaped by ‘othering’ and internal demarcation between disciplines (especially the sociology and philosophy of science). However, at the same time, our conversations reveal not only that a multitude of approaches co-exist, dealing with these boundaries differently and more productively, but also that a growing scholarly community is willing to explore new interdisciplinary avenues for cooperation.
We do not want to give the wrong impression that the research carried out at c:o/re is free of contradicting or even controversies – far from it. The conference has seen plenty of contradictory arguments and contestations among the speakers, in a way that accounts for two important matters for any research institute, namely that (1) this center is a platform for free academic debate and that (2) the approaches it hosts are epistemically compatible (that two positions on a topic are contradictory implies that they are mutually relevant). Actually, the one claim on which we found total agreement is that Freedom of Research is currently one of the most important issues for the academe, as well as society broadly. All fellows, team and scientific advisory board members see the urgent need of freely (!) discussing the freedom of scholars in the current context when sociotechnical shifts have consequences for the freedom of speech and expression.
Of course, discussion on what freedom in research is, how it is practiced and how it should be supported institutionally was fiery, encompassing a broad variety of perspectives. Overall, there is agreement that this is how an exercise in academic freedom looks like: we are free and enabled institutionally to contradict each other. We note that the Cultures of Research conference took place shortly after a new US administration started exercising pressure on scientists and universities. Political pressure on academia will undoubtedly constitute a main concern for c:o/re in its second cycle of funding, shaping its future development, as we hope and anticipate that it will shape the future development of philosophical and social inquiry on technology in general.
Unless otherwise noted, photos by Christian van’t Hoen.
The program with all speakers and titles of the conference can be found in this document.
Theodore von Kármán Fellowship to Professor Victor de Lorenzo
Victor de Lorenzo, chemist and Professor of Research in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he currently heads the Laboratory of Environmental Synthetic Biology at the National Center for Biotechnology, has been awarded the Theodore von Kármán Fellowship by RWTH Aachen University.
Professor Lars Blank (Chair of Applied Microbiology) and KHK c:o/re director Professor Gabriele Gramelsberger jointly applied for the fellowship. The fellowship thus strengthens interdisciplinary cooperation in the field of biotechnology.
The fellowship enables Victor de Lorenzo to spend two weeks at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) at RWTH Aachen University, where he will work on the project “Synthetic Biology: From Domination of the Natural World to Partnership and Negotiation”. This project proposes to explore synthetic biology not only as a tool for control, but also as a means to reimagine our interactions with the microbial world. Drawing parallels with the changing perception of animals in Western societies – from resources to sentient beings – it argues for developing a new epistemology for microbes, recognizing their agency and evolutionary narratives. By integrating science, philosophy, and art, this project seeks to anticipate and shape a new ethic of coexistence, negotiation, and compromise with the microbial world.
To present the outcomes of this fellowship, Victor de Lorenzo will give a public university lecture entitled “Design Meets Evolution: Theory and Practice” on May 13, 2025, from 5 to 6.30 pm, at the KHK c:o/re, Theaterstr. 75. For further information and registration, please have a look at the event here.
RWTH Kármán-Fellowships are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine Westphalia (MKW) under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.
Emotional AI in the Japanese and German Workplace: Exploring Cultural Diversity in AI Ethics as Variety of Science
STEFAN BÖSCHEN, MASAHIKO HARA, PETER MANTELLO AND ALIN OLTEANU
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) is a partner on the project Emotional AI in the Japanese and German Workplace: Exploring Cultural Diversity in AI Ethics, led by Professor Peter Mantello of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) and funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The project has been ongoing for about a year, and in January 2025, c:o/re director Stefan Böschen and Alin Olteanu visited Professor Mantello and conducted a first field study in Japan for this project.
As the title claims, this project examines the developments in Emotional AI from a comparative perspective between Japan and Germany. Such research is, of course, conducted in the context of increasingly rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). So far, these developments have occurred in waves. Phases of great innovative momentum alternated with phases in which this topic appeared dormant. The recent technological platform of large language models such as ChatGPT suggests that this field is now entering a phase of lasting and disruptive development. The great geopolitical competition between world regions is exemplified in the sudden appearance of China’s DeepSeek. These developments raise questions about the specific technological development under the respective cultural-institutional framework conditions. With its AI Act, the European Union has issued the strictest, risk-based regulation of AI, striking a balance between protection against technology and industrial development, while the United States and Japan appear, at least at the present moment, reluctant to lay down a concrete regulatory policy, preferring instead a market state approach.
Our project offers the opportunity to reflect not only on the specific challenges for science studies, but importantly, in the context of the increasingly quantified workplace, where insights can be fed into the varieties of science discussions pioneered at c:o/re. The following itinerary documents the journey of c:o/re director Stefan Böschen and former team member Alin Olteanu through Japan, together with Principal Investigator Peter Mantello, along with Co-Investigator Hiroshi Miyashita of Chuo University, and the local assistance of Masahiko Hara, an alumni fellow of c:o/re who graciously gave us his time to accompany us from Tokyo to Beppu. The following blog post outlines some of the places and people we met along the way, as well as revealing insights we achieved on this whirlwind one week journey.
Tokyo, Monday, January 13th – AI Workshop
On the 13th of January, a workshop on the Future of AI was held at Ritsumeikan University’s Tokyo Campus at Sapia Tower. Bringing together stakeholders from the private sector, academia, and non-governmental organizations, the workshop explored various risks and opportunities of AI development in Japan. Some of the speakers included researcher Nicole Müller from the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), who spoke about the implications of Emotional AI and Extended Reality, Imam Habib, managing director of Menlo Park, a venture capital firm, who described the regulatory challenges facing AI start-ups in the field of healthcare, Professor Hiroshi Miyashita, speaking as a data privacy expert who examined emerging legal issues surrounding the nascent but rapidly growing field of neurotechnology and Dennis Tesolat, a spokesman for General Union, Japan’s largest labor advocacy group, who spoke about the increasing employer-employee conflicts due to the adoption of AI management systems by a growing number of Japanese companies.
Tokyo, Tuesday, January 14th – German Institute for Japanese Studies and TeamLabs
In the morning of the 14th of January, we visited the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) and held discussions with the Deputy Director of Sociology, Barbara Holhus, exploring the possibility of various short and longer-term collaboration avenues between DIJ, c:o/re and other Japanese universities. Having identified various research avenues of common interest, we agreed to meet regularly in the future. The trio of DIJ-c:o/re-APU brings a set of complementary competences to collaborate on the comparative study of research cultures and their technological evolution.
Later that day, before catching Japan’s famous Shinkansen highspeed train to our next destination, Kyoto, we took the opportunity of a mid-day hiatus to visit TeamLab Planets, an interactive museum providing customized AI-powered art experiences. Utilizing state-of-the-art technology, TeamLab Planets offers visitors seven different types of multi-sensory, fully immersive artistic environments. Not only did we all find this immersive experience very relaxing, we also noted how inspiring and motivating it can be, especially for the science and technology scholars.
Kyoto, Wednesday, January 15th – Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute and School of Informatics
On the 15th of January, we ventured to Kyoto University to meet researchers at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI). Here we learned from various faculty members of the institute about the latest of current research developments in natural hazard reduction and integrated strategies utilizing the latest modeling software for disaster loss reduction. We were certainly surprised at the institute’s multidisciplinary embrace of artistic interventions in this regard, as a presentation by Naoko Tosa, a resident artist at DPRI, described her fascinating and thought-provoking designs in clothing fabric which weave digital sensors and actuators that are activated by cellular emergency warnings. Afterwards, we were invited to visit her studio, where we had a chance to get a closer look at the technical and conceptual aspects of her creative process in designing ‘disaster couture’.
The day concluded with a visit to the Department of Informatics at Kyoto University, where we met Professor Jaward Haqbeen, an Afghan AI researcher whose work focuses on the use of generative AI in language acquisition in developing countries such as Afghanistan and Nepal. We have discussed plans for future collaboration, particularly on matters of education, language learning and technological literacies.
Osaka, Thursday, January 16th – NTT’s Brain Lab Osaka University
On Thursday, we headed to Osaka to visit one of Japan’s leading research centers for brain science, NTT’s Human Information Science Laboratory (HISF) at Osaka University. Employing a multidisciplinary approach to neuroscience, HISF brings together some of the nation’s top scientists from the fields of information science, psychology, and neuroscience. Utilizing cutting-edge technologies, HISF researchers study the mechanisms underlying human perception, cognition, emotion, and movement with a current focus on understanding how environmental and social information is processed in the human body and brain. These findings are expected to serve as basis for future information technologies that are conceptually new and user-friendly. During their presentation, we learned about technology development in a surprising way, especially about the “Yuragi-Group”. This group originally develops AI according to the unique cultural principle of Yuragi, which not only enables new technical options, but also allows specific value judgments to be realized (the topic of transparency of AI). They have arrived at a unique form of AI programming that differs from deep learning programs in relevant parameters. In this way, an element of transparency has been built into the AI, as the map of affordances (this is, so to speak, the cognitive system of the AI; our formulation) can be transferred to the next system in each case. It relies on a cultural repertoire and the formation of epistemic heuristics.
Beppu, Friday, January 17th – Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
On Friday the 17th, the team along with Professor Masahiko Hara (Institute of Science, Tokyo) gave talks at Professor Mantello’s home institution, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, located on the east coast of Kyushu Island in the south of Japan. Targeting a primarily undergraduate audience, Stefan Böschen gave an informative lecture on the importance of science and technology studies. Alin Olteanu engaged students with a talk on the semiotics of Digital Nomadism and Masahiko Hara on his experimental artistic interventions into intelligent interfaces that read human emotions.
Outlook
Like most countries, Japan and Germany share fundamental values such as freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. They also agree that accountability, transparency, human rights and privacy should be built into AI. Yet where the EU/Germany wants a top-down government-led approach to mitigate AI harms, Japan (at least at the moment) prefers an industry/sector approach to give the technology a good chance to grow. At the government level, the annual Japan/Germany ICT Policy dialog forum promotes the need for common rules on AI. Importantly, Japanese labor law is influenced by the German legal contexts. But while German law on AI in the workplace is becoming increasingly precise and restrictive, current Japanese law is vague and ambiguous. Thus, it is important to refer to the development of both EU and German law for comparisons of Emotional AI in the workplace. As Co-Investigator Hiroshi Miyashita argues, “Japan is well-known for importing foreign laws, but a patchwork of copy/paste does not work well in a Japan”.
Concomitantly, our collaborative efforts to date suggest that Japan could offer a third way by heuristically exploring the space of AI development that seeks to create harmonious human-machine relationships, with a focus on AI that preserves human dignity. Keeping this in mind, the journey goes on, and we look forward to further opportunities to collaborate with the project of Professor Mantello, as well as with the DIJ and other stakeholders from both the private and public sector. It is interesting to note that the Japanese government is fueling the evolutionary dynamic in the field by creating far-reaching exchange opportunities for incoming researchers.
Photo Credits: Peter Mantello
