Principal Investigator: Karen Kastenhofer (Institute of Technology Assessment -ITA, ÖAW)
Grant: 78,031.00 €
Abstract: Digital technologies have by now permeated every area of our lives and every field of activity. A constant stream of digital innovations is shaping how we communicate, how we work and how we make sense of our life worlds. But who shapes these digital innovations? What are the goals, values and ambitions underlying consequential technology designs?
The Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism addresses this important gap: where digital technology is playing a major role in shaping our society, we must be particularly careful in designing this very technology. Leading technology and ethics experts call for “„bring[ing] together humanistic ideals with critical thoughts about technological progress”. This entails acknowledging that the design and application of digital technologies are not value-neutral, and challenges us to design digital technologies in a way that promotes, rather than undermines, fundamental humanist values such as participation and inclusion, justice and transparency, privacy and freedom of speech, self-efficacy and accountability. The authors of the manifesto see a particular responsibility here for the sciences.
One might first think here of the technical sciences and engineering fields in which digital technologies are significantly shaped, and of classical humanistic disciplines, such as philosophy and ethics. However, for several years now, the City of Vienna has also been establishing itself as an internationally recognized cluster of life science research. This research area is significantly shaped by digital innovations, too, and shapes them in return, raising the question: What are the characteristics and requirements of a humanistic perspective on digital technologies in the context of the life sciences?
This project investigates which humanistic approaches, paradigms and practices are already established in the (Viennese) life sciences. It asks about further options and requirements for the development, establishment, strengthening and communication of humanistic digital approaches within life science research communities and at life science research organisations. Its central aim is to productively combine life science research and digital humanism as two essential pillars of Vienna as a research location.
Principal Investigator: Jill Pope (Institut für Stadt- und Regionalforschung, ÖAW)
Grant: 70,928.00 €
Abstract: This anthropological project extends theorising on Vienna as a “post-Yugoslav city”, interrogating its historic and contemporary role as a post-Yugoslav research city (Tyll-Schranz 2023, Živadinović 2022). It asks how Vienna emerged as a contemporary hub for post-Yugoslav research, and how does the post-Yugoslav academic community experience the city, at both affective and material levels? The first part of this project traces the entangled histories that led to Vienna’s emergence as a hub for post-Yugoslav research, up to the present day. The second part uses ethnographic methods including interviews, participant observation and workshops to explore the lived experience of the city’s sizeable academic community of researchers in the humanities and social science who work on the post-Yugoslav region. The significance of this community is reflected in the range of institutions, as well as the many informal networks, conferences and research groups focused on the post-Yugoslav and Balkans region. By examining the intersection between post-Yugoslav migrant communities and knowledge production in Vienna, this project therefore addresses a research gap in urban anthropology, migration studies and higher education research.
Some authors acknowledge Vienna’s historic role as a centre for the field variously known as Balkan Studies, South-East European Studies and Slavic Studies (Mishkova 2017). There is also substantial scholarship on experiences of Vienna’s post-Yugoslav community, however the academic community remains relatively absent in these accounts, although its importance as an education is highlights by some authors (Fischer-Nebmaier 2007; Tyll-Schranz 2023; Mijić 2020, Živadinović 2022). The project seeks to acknowledge the valuable role that migration can play in a city’s knowledge economy, recognising how post-Yugoslav research enriches Vienna’s intellectual landscape. It takes a “post-migration” approach, that honours the heterogeneity and diversity of migrant populations, while taking migration as an inevitable feature of our social worlds
(Dahinden 2016). It acknowledges the historic transnational entanglements between Vienna and the Yugoslav region can be considered as circuits of knowledge production, challenging ideas of centre/periphery and East/West (Vezenkov 2017), which have particular relevance with the ongoing narratives regarding Europeanisation within the post-Yugoslav region. Recognising the contribution of migrants in this way also serves an important political purpose, in a time of anti-migration discourse. Ultimately, the project will provide the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the City of Vienna with valuable insights into the experience of post-Yugoslav migrants within the city’s academic community, and how to support, sustain to grow this important part of the city’s knowledge economy.