What is your professional background and primary research area?

I graduated from Information Studies at Aarhus University in 2002. After that I had a PhD fellowship at Roskilde University. Here, I was part of a research group that focused on Health IT. The group consisted of researchers from DTU, Roskilde, ITU and KU working within Participatory Design, CSCW and STS. The group consisted of Finn Kensing, Keld Bødker, Brit Ross Winthereik, Jesper Simonsen, Erling Havn, Kjeld Schmidt, Magnus Nilsson, Jens Pedersen, Joakim Halse and others.

My PhD project was an ethnographic study of self-care practices and logics with people with diabetes. In the thesis, I examined these practices with STS understandings of technology, materiality, and the body, illuminating how self-care emerges at the intersection of multiple considerations and more-than-human relationships. The thesis can be found here and an article about it here.

In 2008, I was employed at Information Studies. In my work, I have been involved in educational and professional development at Information Studies and have worked closely with Morten Breinbjerg and Lone Koefoed Hansen. I have managed the STS Center at AU for many years in collaboration with good colleagues. Today, I am research program manager together with Søren Pold of the research program Cultures and Practices of Digital Technology. My research is within the field of STS, and focuses on how digitalization transforms organizations, knowledge, and practices. I am also interested in the relationship between knowledge, society, and politics, and how we develop that relationship in a time and world where so much seems to be at stake and where that relationship is crucial.

What is your current research project in SHAPE about?

Our current project, which is supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond, is called 'Cultures of Data Collaboration'. The researchers behind it are Mikkel Rask Pedersen, Patrick Heiberg Kapsch, Peter Lauritsen and Peter Danholt. Through interviews and ethnographic methods, we investigate the use of digital systems and data in social work, and with socially vulnerable children and young people and their families. Our partners are Aarhus and Norddjurs municipalities. In collaboration with the participants, the aim is to develop understandings and recommendations for how public administration can work with and use data in responsible ways. A key point is that data can both provide insights, raise new questions, and call for other and more data. So how do you use data, not just as facts, but as occasions for enquiry and negotiation?

What future projects do you have in the pipeline?

There are always many small and large projects in the pipeline as a researcher. A recurring focus in my research is how digitalization changes our understanding of reality and our society. I'm interested in the ontological consequences of the digital and the ontology of the digital. I believe we need empirical studies of digitalization and need to theorize the relationship with the digital. We also need to create alternative understandings of the digital not as something that ‘just’ needs to be regulated, designed and implemented in the ‘right’ way. I am interested in how we can develop ways of living with the digital that recognizes the digital as a form of wildness that surprises and changes us and escapes our control.

Digitalization has profound implications for how we understand social order, governance and democracy. In a digital reality, we live in a state where our knowledge and information base has grown enormously in just a few years, and is doubling at an increasing rate. But sociologically and anthropologically, this has not led to a more ‘unified’ reality. On the contrary, as some have pointed out, we live in a world-of-many-worlds. I am concerned with how we develop forms of knowledge, social institutions, and communities that are robust, curious, enlightened and caring for the social and natural world.

Selected references:

Danholt, P. (2024). Antropocæn: en indviklet forenkling? I Antropocæn: menneske, samfund og dannelse i en ny tidsalder (s. 99-117). Unge Pædagoger.

Danholt, P., & Gad, C. (Eds.). (2021). Videnskab, teknologi og samfund: En introduktion til STS. Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Danholt, P. (2021). Droner og drømmerier. PROSA prosabladet.dk/nyheder/nyhed/droner-og-droemmerier

Danholt, P. (2020). Levedygtige nutider. Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund, 17(33), Article 33. doi.org/10.7146/tfss.v17i33.123587

Danholt, P., Klausen, M. B., & Bossen, C. (2020). Data: A cosmopolitical approach. STS Encounters, 11(1). tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/135284/180066

Danholt, P. (2019). Glemte vi at tænke abstrakt, da vi sagde ja til el-løbehjul i gaderne? videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/glemte-vi-at-taenke-abstrakt-da-vi-sagde-ja-til-el-loebehjul-i-gaderne