The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

by Cathrine Hasse (Contributor), Ayo Wahlberg (Contributor)

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world.

The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies.

785 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Cathrine Hasse has a long expertise in studying the relation between learning and culture in organizations with a special focus on universities and technical laboratories as workplaces. She is trained as an anthropologist and a cultural psychologist and her main study object (material-conceptual cultural learning processes) have through many years of academic work steadily increased her insight in a wide variety of engineering activities and physics at university level as well as schools. In recent years, these insights have been contextualized by knowledge of how culture influence material-conceptual learning processes in physics, AI and robotic engineering in a number of European countries. She is, and has been, coordinator of EU-projects, as well as projects financed by the Danish Research Council. She is also a member of several advisory boards and as well as a present and former member of boards of educational institutions. She has contributed as an evaluator of several university disciplines (including the interdisciplinary structures at Linköping University). Her present academic work is concentrated on how people in Europe are affected by new technologies such as robots, drones and AI. She did her PhD. on "cultural learning processes" in a physics institute where she followed a group of young male and female physicists' students in their first years of study. This project developed into a longitudinal study. She has followed the same group of students for more than 6 years. In her next project The Cultural Dimensions of Science she compared university institutions in Denmark and Italy and after this project she became the co-coordinator of an EU project, financed by EU 6th framework programme, UPGEM (Understanding Puzzles in the Gendered European Map) and is now the coordinator of the REELER (Responsible and Ethical Learning in Robotics) project (reeler.eu). In her research work she takes a special interest in the relations between culture, learning, concept-making, new materialism, posthumanism, gender and education. She is presently the coordinator of a project on the relation between workplace learning and technological literacy funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council. She is the author of several books on cultural learning processes, education, robotics and AI and methodology, and has an international as well as Danish bulk of peer-reviewed journal articles in her portfolio, just as she is an active conference speaker on a number of conferences including conferences with broad interests in the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS) postphenomenology, cultural psychology, learning theory, as well as the future of universities.

Reviews

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a milestone publication in the development of a new subfield of anthropology, the anthropology of technology (AoT). Initial influences on this field included the French anthropology of techniques and Anglo-American science and technology studies (STS). Essentially, AoT applies anthropological methods (including participant observation) to study two related phenomena: first, the role of culture in shaping existing and new technologies, and second, the role of new technologies, reciprocally, in shaping human cultures. Characteristic of the field is anthropology's unique methodology, participant observation, coupled with the STS-derived methodology of revealing the social assumptions built into technological systems. The result is a powerful approach that is equally able of revealing the social and cultural assumptions built into new technologies as well as the resulting impact of those technically embodied assumptions on people and communities. The book predicts a robust future for AoT thanks to the increasing penetration of technologies in the lives of ordinary people worldwide. The numerous outstanding chapters exemplify the distinguished contribution that this new field is making. A great book... but unaffordable, sadly.