Universitätsstr. 150
44801 Bochum
GD 1/249 / Postfach 80
+49 (0)234 32 27947
estrid.sorensen@rub.de
Consultations hours: Wednesday 13-14 hrs.
Please make an appointment: cupak-sowi@rub.de
Since my studies at the University of Copenhagen I have been wondering about how materiality – particularly technology – contributes to shaping both knowledge and social life. In recent years, this has extended to concerns about how planetary materiality – e.g. raw materials, energy sources – is both involved in shaping how knowledge is produced and contributes to shaping the surface of the planet. This attention includes interests in how the social sciences can become better in grasping planetary materiality, and what methods and practices can themselves be considered planetary healthy. For this, I find decolonial literature helpful.
Inspired by Science & Technology Studies I conduct micro-analytical ethnographic studies to provide insights into the details of how knowledge and socio-material practices are configured and negotiated – across both humans and non-humans.
My current research attends mainly to data practices and data infrastructures, particularly to scientific data centres. I am interested in how data practices and data centres on the one hand shape how science knows, and on the other hand in their excessive consumption of planetary resources, such as energy and minerals. I inquire into how thinking changes with different data practices, and into the social and organisational practices that make the planitarity of scientific infrastructures and thus of scientific knowledge invisible; and into the historical practices that did so in the past and that have shaped contemporary data infrastructures.
Key stations of my career were my doctoral studies at the University of Lancaster with John Law and Lucy Suchman, my Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the TU-Berlin in sociology of technology with Werner Rammert and a post doc position at the Institute for European Ethnology with Stefan Beck at the Humboldt University Berlin. 2010 I was appointed junior professor in the Mercator Research Group followed by a full professorship in the department of Social Science at the Ruhr-University Bochum. Former research projects have addressed cybersecurity, digital health programmes, virtual environments in an educational context, documentation practices and computer game concerns across science, law, game design, family and situations of play.
Since July 2016:
Professor for Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge, Faculty of Social Science, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2010-2016:
Junior Professor for Cultural Psychology and Anthropological Knowledge in the Mercator Research Group “Spaces of Anthropological Knowledge: Production and Transfer” and the Faculty of Social Science, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2008 – 2010:
Assistant Professor at Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Department for Learning
2008 – 2010:
Scientific co-ordinator of the "Collaboratory: Social Anthropology and Life Science" at the Department for European Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
2007:
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Department for Sociology of Technology, Technical University, Berlin
Abels, S., Çelik, L., Laser, S. & Sørensen, E. (2024). A good enough Data Centre? In: Biørn-Hansen, A et al (2024). Liminal Excavations: A zine that explores alternative visions, ideas and critiques on the topic of sustainability and ICT, pp. 56-61. Sustainable Futures Lab. doi:10.21428/57a7f7a7.5d685a20
Biørn-Hansen, A. et al. (2024). Liminal Excavations: A zine that explores alternative visions, ideas and critiques on the topic of sustainability and ICT. Sustainable Futures Lab. doi:10.21428/57a7f7a7.5d685a20
RUSTlab, Amelang, K., Asai, R., Çelik, L., Eggel, R., Galanova, O., Laser, S., Ojala, M., Pittroff, F., Sørensen, E., Werner, L. (2024). Please Go Away... We‘re Reading: A Practice Approach to a Taken-for-Granted Academic Craft. In: On_Culture, 16. doi: 10.22029/oc.2024.1415
Dietzsch, I. Franken, L., Imeri, S., Kinder-Kurlanda, K., Sørensen, E., & Vepřek, L. H. (2024). Quo Vadis kulturwissenschaftliche Digital Humanities? In: Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10698334
Kocksch, L., & Sørensen, E. (2023). Towards a Typology of Interdisciplinarity in Cybersecurity: Trade, Choice, and Agnostic-Antagonist. In: Proceedings of the 2023 New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW '23), pp. 116-129. New York (NY): Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3633500.3633510
Amelang, K., Klausner, M., Sørensen, E., Straube, T., Friton, J., & Queckenberg, R. (2023). Daten erfahren und situieren: Datenspaziergänge als explorative Methode ethnografischer Forschung. In: Kulturanthropologie Notizen, 85, pp. 111–138. https://doi.org/10.21248/ka-notizen.85.20
Gorur, R., Sørensen, E., & Maddox, B. (2023). Standardisierung des Kontexts und Kontextualisierung des Standards: Die Übertragung von PISA auf PISA-D. In: M. J. Prutsch (Ed.), Wissenschaft, Zahlen und Politik, pp. 325-356. Cham, Schweiz: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23073-8_14
Kocksch, L., & Sørensen, E. (2023). Investigating the Sustainability-Cybersecurity Nexus in HCI as a Practical Problem: Submission to Workshop WS27: HCI for Climate Change: Imagining Sustainable Futures. Bochum: Ruhr-Universität Bochum. https://d-nb.info/1296812146/34
Sørensen, E., & Laser, S. (2023). Towards Artful Sustainable Integration of IT Infrastructures. In: P. Jankowski, A. Höfner, M. L. Hoffmann, F. Rohde, R. Rehak & J. Graf (Eds.), Shaping Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society. Contributions from Bits & Bäume, pp. 87-90. Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin.
https://publication2023.bits-und-baeume.org/#87
Please find a complete list of publications in this document.
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Last update: May 13, 2025
