Ulrike Felt

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• Professor
• Professor at University of Vienna

In late 2019, Germany took significant steps towards becoming a forerunner in digital health. A new legislation stipulated that medical apps for different indications could now be prescribed to patients by their healthcare providers – the so-called Digital Health Applications (DiGAs). Patients’ public health insurance then covers the costs for thes...

The notion ‘smart city' has found a prominent place in urban visions, policies, planning, and infrastructure development, often promising citizens’ participation in shaping urban futures. This paper examines the frictions emerging between powerful Smart City Vienna policy imaginaries and their realization in real-world participatory experiments. Dr...

Many cities have formulated strategies, visions, and policies to deploy a local version of the "smart city." While analysts have frequently focused on tech innovators as central players, this paper takes one step back investigating policy documents and how they open a space to reimagine the city. Taking Vienna as a case study, we examine how policy...

Biobanking involves the assembling, curating, and distributing of samples and data. While relations between samples and data are often taken as defining properties of biobanking, several studies have pointed to the challenges in relating them in practice. This article investigates how samples and data are curated, connected, and made mobile in prac...

This paper engages with the translation of the abstract concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) into practice. Our investigation is situated within a large-scale European project seeking to develop a citizen-centered digital health data platform. We specifically engage with co-creation practices and their potential for creating and mai...

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is one of the oldest, largest, and most emblematic European research infrastructures. Its history, as expressed through narratives of its own organizational identity, does not only reflect the development of its technoscientific activities but also strongly references a multiplicity of performan...

Background: Digital health solutions have been omnipresent in policy agendas. However, we still need to better understand how citizens experience these developments and, more specifically, how citizens would ideally want such solutions to look like. Objective: We explore the needs and concerns citizens expressed in different phases of the co-cre...

Issues related to research integrity receive increasing attention in policy discourse and beyond with most universities having introduced by now courses addressing issues of good scientific practice. While communicating expectations and regulations related to good scientific practice is essential, criticism has been raised that integrity courses do...

A central and formative ingredient in the governance of migration in the European Union (EU) is the continuous construction of a large-scale digital infrastructure to ensure border security. Although border and critical security studies have increasingly focused on the multiple aspects of techno-materiality and infrastructural devices of border con...

Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) provides the interface for the meeting of farmers and scientists. This is a meeting of different social worlds, contesting agendas, cultures of cooperation and networks of actors. Like in other disciplines, scientists in AR4D have developed their own culture of science. However, the role of their culture...

EU and Japan strengthen research and innovation collaboration on robotics solutions for active and healthy ageing The Commission and Japanese partners have successfully collaborated in research and innovation projects on the challenges associated with population ageing. The report details how the Commission and its Japanese partners have created...

Building on group discussions and interviews with life science researchers in Austria, this paper analyses the narratives that researchers use in describing what they feel responsible for, with a particular focus on how they perceive the societal responsibilities of their research. Our analysis shows that the core narratives used by the life scient...

The digitization of health has been high on policy agendas, promising to become the solution for many of the challenges that Europe’s health care systems are facing. While the visions of future digital health solutions are rather promising, it is important to also attend to the challenges their realization faces. In drawing on our experience in the...

Deliverable D1.2 provides the methodological design of the co-creation environment putting citizens centre-stage in the research, development and design processes of an interoperable prototype for electronic health record exchange. It outlines the co-creation processes as well as the considerations to be taken into account in designing and running...

Exploring Science Communication demonstrates how science and technology studies approaches can be explicitly integrated into effective, powerful science communication research. Through a range of case studies, from climate change and public parks to Facebook, museums, and media coverage, it helps you to understand and analyse the complex and divers...

Short Abstract Deliverable D1.4 outlines a first set of insights concerning citizen/ user consent language in the framework of the Smart4Health project. It embeds this work into wider debates on the challenges of informed consent and describes the way a first version of the Informed Consent form for the use of the 4HealthPlatform was developed. It...

Short Abstract Deliverable D1.3 provides the first specification of user requirements and, accordingly, the identification of related performance criteria. The report provides insights into the main considerations, the methodological approach and in the co-creation activities that were performed with future users. Based on these latter a 1 st set o...

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using...

Before the EU General Data Protection Regulation entered into force in May 2018, we witnessed an intense struggle of actors associated with data-dependent fields of science, in particular health-related academia and biobanks striving for legal derogations for data reuse in research. These actors engaged in a similar line of argument and formed issu...

The objective of Deliverable 1.1 is to provide a general Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) framework for Horizon 2020 project Smart4Health. This project aims to build the prototype for an interoperable health-data platform-the 4HealthPlatform-and a corresponding user portal-the 4HealthNavigator-in order to empower citizens to proactively engage...

This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic “buzzwords” and the projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project...

Mentioning nuclear energy and Austria in one and the same discursive strand is usually interpreted as a reference to a clear rejection of nuclear power as a hallmark of Austria's technopolitical identity. After a rather shaky decision against nuclear energy in the late 1970ies Austria's anti-nuclear imaginary has managed to gradually solidify and g...

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using...

Rethinking Society for the 21st Century - by International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) July 2018

Democracy, as we understand it, is a process of collective decision-making among persons, which issues in collectively binding norms for the society of those persons. It is a process of decision-making in which persons participate as equals in determining the legal and conventional norms that bind them and in which the group of persons, taken colle...

The future is too often constructed as a linear continuation of past and present, a trajectory that clearly leads from now to then, thus partially stripping it of its complex and unexpected nature. Tempting as it is to conceptualize the future as a neatly unfolding pattern, such a commitment to linearity narrows the range of plausible futures imagi...

In this contribution we explore the recent reforms and transformations of Austrian universities as processes that are in many ways shaped by explicit and implicit normative assumptions about the past, present and futures of universities in national and international contexts. We argue that a reflexive engagement with the prospective and retrospecti...

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a new buzzword in science policy, pointing to a shift in the role of research plays in contemporary societies. While on a discursive level responsibility is easily welcomed, to implement RRI in research practice seems challenging. RRI comes at a time when other forces, such as a call for fast inn...

This essay aims at relating the growth of indicators to the shifting temporalities of academic work. Drawing on research into academic work and lives but also on professional experiences, I develop the notion of chronopolitics to analyze the politics of time governing academic knowledge production, work and evaluation. Drawing on a range of example...

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a flourishing interdisciplinary field that examines the transformative power of science and technology to arrange and rearrange contemporary societies. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field, reviewing current research and major theoreti...

In recent years, “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) has become a new buzzword at the core of European science policy discourses and beyond. Using a narrative approach, this paper aims to explore how academic researchers can potentially make sense of RRI and turn it into an academic core value. Narratives on research and its relation to soc...

There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and “hyper-competition.” Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior resear...

Diversity has become a buzzword in medical care, denoting a re-evaluation of what it means to attend to differences among human bodies and lives. Questions about what types of differences matter and how they should be defined have become important normative and analytical challenges. Drawing on two case studies, we show how differences between pati...

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in bariatric surgery rates. This form of obesity treatment is often subjected to the critique that it turns patients into passive objects of medical intervention. Similarly, efforts to 'rationalize' medicine, as in evidence-based medicine, are sometimes denounced for imposing a 'one-size-fits-a...

Practices of ordering are powerful means of giving structure to people’s lives and providing a sense of control. The analysis of three episodes from discus-sion groups on nanotechnology in Austria shows that citizens evaluate new technologies with regard to how they intersect with, support, or disturb exist-ing orders. The concept of discursive ass...

Over the past decades, we have witnessed calls for greater transdisciplinary engagement between scientific and societal actors to develop more robust answers to complex societal challenges. Although there seems to be agreement that these approaches might nurture innovations of a new kind, we know little regarding the research practices, their poten...

This study explores how Austrian newspapers and magazines report on the obesity epidemic. We show how the media provide a space for formulating situated diagnostic narratives, i.e., accounts that develop both a diagnosis of society through the lens of a health phenomenon and a definition of the phenomenon itself. Nourished by globally circulating d...

Time is an essential feature of social life that not only enables us to structure and order our worlds but also to create and sustain the feeling of stability and belonging. However, even though time is deeply entangled with questions of control and power, it tends to be all-too-easily naturalized and to remain unquestioned. The goal of this chapte...

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Calls for more broad-based, integrated, useful knowledge now abound in the world of global environmental change science. They evidence many scientists' desire to help humanity confront the momentous biophysical implications of its own actions. But they also reveal a limited conception of social science and virtually ignore the humanities. They ther...

Obesity is generally considered to be a growing global health problem that results from changes in the way we live in late modern societies. In this article, we argue that investigating the complexities of contemporary timescapes (i.e. the entanglement of physical, culturally framed and personally experienced times) is of key importance for underst...

Over past decades we have witnessed considerable debate questioning the capacity of contemporary research to address the challenges posed by complex societal developments. As a consequence the need for rethinking cultures and practices of knowledge production has moved high on the policy agenda. In this context transdisciplinarity has become one of...

Purpose – Reflections on negotiation processes between farmers and scientists in research projects provide insights into issues of participation, power and equity. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how actors chose places to meet, negotiate and represent technologies. Design/methodology/approach – The research involved semi‐structured int...

Media have become an important arena of and actor in the co-evolution of science and society. Medialization re-shapes the professional and public identities of scientists, who are increasingly expected to consider communication activities as part of their professional role. Our interest in this contribution lies in tracing how medialization impinge...

If we take the rhetoric of recent academic and policy discourse at face value, crossing disciplinary and institutional boundaries and engaging extra-scientific actors in the production and distribution of knowledge has become a kind of ‘gold standard’ . This is particularly true for fields like sustainability research, which is supposed to address...

In 2011, Thomson-Reuters introduced the Book Citation Index (BKCI) as part of the Science Citation Index (SCI). The interface of the Web of Science version 5 enables users to search for both "Books" and "Book Chapters" as new categories. Books and book chapters, however, were always among the cited references, and book chapters have been included i...

In 2011, Thomson-Reuters introduced the Book Citation Index (BKCI) as part of the Science Citation Index (SCI). The interface of the Web of Science version 5 enables users to search for both “Books” and “Book Chapters” as new categories. Books and book chapters, however, were always among the cited references, and book chapters have been included i...

Innovation politics is seen as an ever more central area of public policy, and as a key means for shaping societal futures. Particularly in Europe, with its history of controversial public debates about innovations, the idea that scientific progress is automatically equated with societal progress seems hard to sustain. Broader public participation...

The practices around genetic testing for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer in one major counselling centre in Austria are at the core of this article. Our study investigates how people undergoing genetic testing try to make sense of this experience that is perceived to be new and uncommon in Austria and that is thus taking place in a setting not...

This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand,...

In this comparative analysis of twelve focus groups conducted in Austria, France, and the Netherlands, we investigate how lay people come to terms with two biomedical technologies. Using the term "technopolitical culture," we aim to show that the ways in which technosciences are interwoven with a specific society frame how citizens build their indi...

Starting from the assumption that science and technology policy have become a key actor in the construction of European knowledge society, this contribution investigates the political discourse on « science and society ». On the basis of a selection of European policy documents covering the last decades, the analysis has made us identify four major...

Zusammenfassung Ziel dieses Artikels ist eine methodenpolitische Reflexion partizipativer ELSA-Forschung. Aufbauend auf drei Forschungsprojekte analysieren wir, wie unterschiedlich gestaltete methodische Räume verschiedene Repräsentationen vonWissenschaft und Gesellschaft ermöglichen. Erstens diskutieren wir, in welcher Weise verschiedene Methoden...

Es gab bislang „nichts Vergleichbares in der Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften“, hob ein jüngst in der renommierten Zeitschrift Nature (2007) erschienenes Editorial zum Thema Nanotechnologien und Gesellschaft mit Nachdruck hervor. Damit wird nicht etwa — wie man annehmen könnte — auf das techno-ökonomische Potenzial von Nanotechnologien in ihren v...

This article challenges the assumption that patient autonomy can best be assured by providing proper information through formalized procedures such as informed consent. We suggest that to understand and consider laypeople's ways of knowing and decision making, one has to move beyond the information paradigm and take into account a much broader cont...

This paper investigates how public discourses, as articulated in EU policy and Austrian media documents, take part in the creation and stabilisation of a new patient figure – the e-patient. The documents we analysed act as one material form for enacting, performing and giving meaning to the changes occurring when a new technology enters established...

This paper explores the difficulties of addressing ethical questions of genome research in a public engagement setting where laypeople and scientists met for a longer period of time. While professional ethics mostly ignores public meaning, we aimed at a bottom-up approach to ethics in order to broaden the way in which ethical aspects of genomics ca...

If the rhetoric pervading much of recent academic and policy discourse is to be taken at face value, engaging the public in the governance of science has become a kind of gold standard. However, very little is known about citizens' perspectives on public engagement in the governance of science, let alone about the social processes and the meaning p...

In recent years, governance and public participation have developed into key notions within both policy discourse and academic analysis. While there is much discussion on developing new modes of governance and public participation, little empirical attention is paid to the public's perception of models, possibilities and limits of participation and...

Es steht außer Zweifel, dass die Debatte um embryonale Stammzellen langfristig kritisches Potential in sich trägt, und, wie wir über das letzte Jahrzehnt beobachten konnten, auch keineswegs einfach zu beenden ist. Sie war und ist immer begleitet von einem Diskurs über Hoffnung auf Heilung von Krankheit, gehüllt in eine dichte Metaphorik, die gleich...