Helga Nowotny in Conversation with Elena Esposito

Helga Nowotny; Elena Esposito

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15464

Authors

Helga Nowotny ETH Zurich https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3719-4227

Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich (Switzerland), founding member and former President of the European Research Council.She is currently member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin, Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development and was Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She received multiple honorary doctorates including from the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). Her latest publication is In AI We Trust. Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity Press, 2021).
Elena Esposito Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna; Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3075-292X

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the University Bielefeld (Germany) and the University of Bologna (Italy). She has published extensively on the theory of society, media theory, memory theory and the sociology of financial markets. Her current research on algorithmic prediction is supported by a five-year Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Her latest book is Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence, MIT Press, 2022. The Italian translation, Comunicazione artificiale. Come gli algoritmi producono l'intelligenza sociale, will be published in October 2022 by EGEA; the Chinese translation will be published in December 2022 by Shanghai Jiaotong University Press.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15464

Keywords:

Social Time, STS, Sociology of Science, Social Impact of Algorithms, Science Policy, Gender

Abstract

Helga Nowotny, Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies at ETH Zurich, is a leading scholar in the social studies of science and technology. In her extensive publications she dealt, among other topics, with social and individual structuring of time, technological innovation, uncertainty, social effects of AI, and the interaction between biological life and social life. Always intensely engaged in research policy, Nowotny is one of the founding members of the European Research Council and was its President from 2010 to 2013. In this conversation with Elena Esposito, she talks about her scientific biography, the role of technologies in the experience of time, and the relationship between STS and sociology of science. Drawing on her experience in the organization and funding of science at EU level, she also reflects on the relationship between research and science policy and on the ongoing transformations in the way of doing research and in gender issues.

References

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Helga Nowotny in Conversation with Elena Esposito

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