Christopher Gad
Biographic Data
| ID | 87965 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Gad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Gad |
| SIGNATURE | GAD C |
| AFFILIATIONS | IT University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1631-5483 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 166 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Trusting elections: Complexities and risks of digital voting in Denmark
It is often said that election processes depend on trust for their legitimacy. Trust is therefore crucial to the sustainability of democracy. It also seems clear that patterns and forms of trust in Western democracies are changing in tandem with digitalization. This paper explores some possible inflections of the concept of trust in the ‘age of digitalization’ by examining its articulation by computer scientists doing research on digital voting a…
Organising Artificial Intelligence and Representing Work
This chapter explores effects of the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) on the organisation of work in the Danish Customs and Tax Administration in a situation where a machine learning algorithm was expected to make the work of customs officers more efficient. The chapter highlights how experiments with machine learning algorithms may redraw intra-organisational boundaries, responsibilities, as well as divisions and meanings of work. …
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Data warehousing organization: Infrastructural experimentation with educational governance
Organization is increasingly entwined with databased governance infrastructures. Developing the idea of 'infrastructure as partial connection' with inspiration from Marilyn Strathern and Science and Technology Studies, this article proposes that database infrastructures are intrinsic to processes of organizing intra- and inter-organizational relations. Seeing infrastructure as partial connection brings our attention to the ontological experimenta…
Praktisk Ontologi: Verdener i STS og antropologi
I denne artikel diskuterer vi spørgsmået om, hvorvidt vi bebor mangfoldige verdener med udgangspunkt i en amoderne tilgang til videnskabs- og teknologistudier (science and technology studies eller STS), som vi kalder praktisk ontologi. På den ene side er denne analytiske position nært beslægtet med antropologiens nylige interesse for ontologi. På den anden side præsenterer vores tilgang en række vigtige forskelle. Disse forskelle vedrører ikke mi…
Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places
This article discusses how a small place - the polling booth - can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case - a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit inf…
Disability as infra-critique: A compositionist approach to the election process in Denmark
This article investigates how disability can work analytically as a ‘critique from within’. Our case is the accommodation of citizens with disabilities during the voting process in Denmark. Here disability makes explicit how Danish democracy is produced as disability rubs up against implicit, normalized and mundane infrastructures and practices. We investigate disability as critique in this sense of affording a both analytic and practical ‘breaku…
Infrakritik og proximering. Om at finde den rette afstand
In this paper, we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation and research. Taking our point of departure in a notion of critique as finding the right proximity introduced by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we discuss alternatives to critique as b…
Lateral Concepts
This essay discusses the complex relation between the knowledges and practices of the researcher and his/her informants in terms of lateral concepts. The starting point is that it is not the prerogative of the (STS) scholar to conceptualize the world; all our “informants” do it too. This creates the possibility of enriching our own conceptual repertoires by letting them be inflected by the concepts of those we study. In a broad sense, the lateral…
Flexible and inflexible energy engagements—A study of the Danish Smart Grid Strategy
The Conceptual and the Empirical in Science and Technology Studies
It is the purpose of this special issue to acknowledge the shifting definitions and uses of the conceptual and empirical in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and to explore the constructive potential of this condition. In this introductory essay we point to four formulations in STS for the relation between the conceptual and the empirical which do not figure them as binaries or opposites: (1) the empirical as a path to the concep…
The Promises of Practice
Practice has become a topic of increasing empirical and conceptual concern within sociology and neighbouring fields. 'Practice' can refer to a location or it can refer to action. It is possible to be 'in practice', to 'have a practice' or to be 'constituted by practice'. Practice can be a cause, an effect or an explanation. Within science and technology studies (STS), the practice orientation is simultaneously analytical - in the form of various …
A Closed Circuit Technological Vision: On Minority Report, event detection, and enabling technologies
In a combined analysis, we investigate how the movie Minority Report can inform and nuance the vision of technological capacities that we identify in event detection literature. The vision in MR of an effective, pre-emptive and preventive techno-politics reflects important areas of event detection research, but it is also a vision for which the movie has become a common cultural reference. While they express similar conceptions of surveillance an…
What we Talk about when we Talk about Sailor Culture: Understanding Danish Fisheries Inspection through a Cult Movie
As a concept, culture can easily appear quite diffuse and it is often contested. This ambiguity begs the question of what it means to invoke the concept in particular situations. This paper is an analytic experiment, which was kick-started when I asked informants about sailor culture during fieldwork onboard the Danish fisheries inspection vessel The West Coast. In response, fisheries inspectors, surprisingly, suggested watching the Danish cult m…
A Public Trial De Novo: Rethinking “Industrial Interests”
This article addresses the concept of “industrial interests” and examines its role in a topical controversy about a large research grant from a private foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, to the University of Copenhagen. The authors suggest that the debate took the form of a “public trial” where the grant and close(r) intermingling between industry and public research was prosecuted and defended. First, the authors address how the grant was …
Overvågning som situeret praksis – et teoretisk bidrag til overvågningsforskningen
To metaforer, Big Brother og panoptikon, dominerer diskussioner om overvågnings generelle karakteristika. På trods af forskelle bidrager de begge til at skabe en bekymret og kritisk indstilling til fænomenet og rummer derved nogle væsentlige analytiske begrænsninger. Med udgangspunkt i Donna Haraways begreb om ”situeret viden” og Bruno Latours begreb om ”oligoptikon” udvikler artiklen en alternativ forståelse, hvor overvågning ses som et situeret…
Resistance Is Fertile – Om Overvågningens Oligoptiske Blik
RESISTANCE IS FERTILE – ON THE OLIGOPTIC GAZE OF SURVEILLANCEThis article sets media artist Jill Magid’s performative artefact “Surveillance Shoe | Legoland” (2000‐7) in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s notion of oligopticon. Both address and discuss the possibility of conceptualizing surveillance as an always specific, multiple, and situated phenomenon, and thus question dominant metaphors in surveillance discourse, e.g. panopticon and Big Brother.T…
On the Consequences of Post-ANT
Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ''genres''. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ''do ANT,'' an…
Situated Surveillance: An ethnographic study of fisheries inspection in Denmark
The field of surveillance studies has gained momentum and with that broadened its empirical gaze to include an increasing number of practices. Yet, the theoretical understanding of surveillance has not developed at the same pace.In this article two dominating metaphors, Big Brother and the panopticon, are critically discussed, and it is argued that fresh theoretical and methodological resources are needed. Using the work of Haraway and Latour the…
On the Consequences of Post-ANT
Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ''genres''. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ''do ANT,'' an…
The Promises of Practice
Practice has become a topic of increasing empirical and conceptual concern within sociology and neighbouring fields. 'Practice' can refer to a location or it can refer to action. It is possible to be 'in practice', to 'have a practice' or to be 'constituted by practice'. Practice can be a cause, an effect or an explanation. Within science and technology studies (STS), the practice orientation is simultaneously analytical - in the form of various …
Situated Surveillance: An ethnographic study of fisheries inspection in Denmark
The field of surveillance studies has gained momentum and with that broadened its empirical gaze to include an increasing number of practices. Yet, the theoretical understanding of surveillance has not developed at the same pace.In this article two dominating metaphors, Big Brother and the panopticon, are critically discussed, and it is argued that fresh theoretical and methodological resources are needed. Using the work of Haraway and Latour the…
Flexible and inflexible energy engagements—A study of the Danish Smart Grid Strategy
The Conceptual and the Empirical in Science and Technology Studies
It is the purpose of this special issue to acknowledge the shifting definitions and uses of the conceptual and empirical in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and to explore the constructive potential of this condition. In this introductory essay we point to four formulations in STS for the relation between the conceptual and the empirical which do not figure them as binaries or opposites: (1) the empirical as a path to the concep…
What we Talk about when we Talk about Sailor Culture: Understanding Danish Fisheries Inspection through a Cult Movie
As a concept, culture can easily appear quite diffuse and it is often contested. This ambiguity begs the question of what it means to invoke the concept in particular situations. This paper is an analytic experiment, which was kick-started when I asked informants about sailor culture during fieldwork onboard the Danish fisheries inspection vessel The West Coast. In response, fisheries inspectors, surprisingly, suggested watching the Danish cult m…
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Data warehousing organization: Infrastructural experimentation with educational governance
Organization is increasingly entwined with databased governance infrastructures. Developing the idea of 'infrastructure as partial connection' with inspiration from Marilyn Strathern and Science and Technology Studies, this article proposes that database infrastructures are intrinsic to processes of organizing intra- and inter-organizational relations. Seeing infrastructure as partial connection brings our attention to the ontological experimenta…
Lateral Concepts
This essay discusses the complex relation between the knowledges and practices of the researcher and his/her informants in terms of lateral concepts. The starting point is that it is not the prerogative of the (STS) scholar to conceptualize the world; all our “informants” do it too. This creates the possibility of enriching our own conceptual repertoires by letting them be inflected by the concepts of those we study. In a broad sense, the lateral…
Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places
This article discusses how a small place - the polling booth - can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case - a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit inf…
Disability as infra-critique: A compositionist approach to the election process in Denmark
This article investigates how disability can work analytically as a ‘critique from within’. Our case is the accommodation of citizens with disabilities during the voting process in Denmark. Here disability makes explicit how Danish democracy is produced as disability rubs up against implicit, normalized and mundane infrastructures and practices. We investigate disability as critique in this sense of affording a both analytic and practical ‘breaku…
Trusting elections: Complexities and risks of digital voting in Denmark
It is often said that election processes depend on trust for their legitimacy. Trust is therefore crucial to the sustainability of democracy. It also seems clear that patterns and forms of trust in Western democracies are changing in tandem with digitalization. This paper explores some possible inflections of the concept of trust in the ‘age of digitalization’ by examining its articulation by computer scientists doing research on digital voting a…
Situated Surveillance: An ethnographic study of fisheries inspection in Denmark
The field of surveillance studies has gained momentum and with that broadened its empirical gaze to include an increasing number of practices. Yet, the theoretical understanding of surveillance has not developed at the same pace.In this article two dominating metaphors, Big Brother and the panopticon, are critically discussed, and it is argued that fresh theoretical and methodological resources are needed. Using the work of Haraway and Latour the…
Overvågning som situeret praksis – et teoretisk bidrag til overvågningsforskningen
To metaforer, Big Brother og panoptikon, dominerer diskussioner om overvågnings generelle karakteristika. På trods af forskelle bidrager de begge til at skabe en bekymret og kritisk indstilling til fænomenet og rummer derved nogle væsentlige analytiske begrænsninger. Med udgangspunkt i Donna Haraways begreb om ”situeret viden” og Bruno Latours begreb om ”oligoptikon” udvikler artiklen en alternativ forståelse, hvor overvågning ses som et situeret…
Resistance Is Fertile – Om Overvågningens Oligoptiske Blik
RESISTANCE IS FERTILE – ON THE OLIGOPTIC GAZE OF SURVEILLANCEThis article sets media artist Jill Magid’s performative artefact “Surveillance Shoe | Legoland” (2000‐7) in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s notion of oligopticon. Both address and discuss the possibility of conceptualizing surveillance as an always specific, multiple, and situated phenomenon, and thus question dominant metaphors in surveillance discourse, e.g. panopticon and Big Brother.T…
On the Consequences of Post-ANT
Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ''genres''. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ''do ANT,'' an…
A Public Trial De Novo: Rethinking “Industrial Interests”
This article addresses the concept of “industrial interests” and examines its role in a topical controversy about a large research grant from a private foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, to the University of Copenhagen. The authors suggest that the debate took the form of a “public trial” where the grant and close(r) intermingling between industry and public research was prosecuted and defended. First, the authors address how the grant was …
What we Talk about when we Talk about Sailor Culture: Understanding Danish Fisheries Inspection through a Cult Movie
As a concept, culture can easily appear quite diffuse and it is often contested. This ambiguity begs the question of what it means to invoke the concept in particular situations. This paper is an analytic experiment, which was kick-started when I asked informants about sailor culture during fieldwork onboard the Danish fisheries inspection vessel The West Coast. In response, fisheries inspectors, surprisingly, suggested watching the Danish cult m…
A Closed Circuit Technological Vision: On Minority Report, event detection, and enabling technologies
In a combined analysis, we investigate how the movie Minority Report can inform and nuance the vision of technological capacities that we identify in event detection literature. The vision in MR of an effective, pre-emptive and preventive techno-politics reflects important areas of event detection research, but it is also a vision for which the movie has become a common cultural reference. While they express similar conceptions of surveillance an…
The Conceptual and the Empirical in Science and Technology Studies
It is the purpose of this special issue to acknowledge the shifting definitions and uses of the conceptual and empirical in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and to explore the constructive potential of this condition. In this introductory essay we point to four formulations in STS for the relation between the conceptual and the empirical which do not figure them as binaries or opposites: (1) the empirical as a path to the concep…
The Promises of Practice
Practice has become a topic of increasing empirical and conceptual concern within sociology and neighbouring fields. 'Practice' can refer to a location or it can refer to action. It is possible to be 'in practice', to 'have a practice' or to be 'constituted by practice'. Practice can be a cause, an effect or an explanation. Within science and technology studies (STS), the practice orientation is simultaneously analytical - in the form of various …
Flexible and inflexible energy engagements—A study of the Danish Smart Grid Strategy
Infrakritik og proximering. Om at finde den rette afstand
In this paper, we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation and research. Taking our point of departure in a notion of critique as finding the right proximity introduced by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we discuss alternatives to critique as b…
Lateral Concepts
This essay discusses the complex relation between the knowledges and practices of the researcher and his/her informants in terms of lateral concepts. The starting point is that it is not the prerogative of the (STS) scholar to conceptualize the world; all our “informants” do it too. This creates the possibility of enriching our own conceptual repertoires by letting them be inflected by the concepts of those we study. In a broad sense, the lateral…
Disability as infra-critique: A compositionist approach to the election process in Denmark
This article investigates how disability can work analytically as a ‘critique from within’. Our case is the accommodation of citizens with disabilities during the voting process in Denmark. Here disability makes explicit how Danish democracy is produced as disability rubs up against implicit, normalized and mundane infrastructures and practices. We investigate disability as critique in this sense of affording a both analytic and practical ‘breaku…
Data warehousing organization: Infrastructural experimentation with educational governance
Organization is increasingly entwined with databased governance infrastructures. Developing the idea of 'infrastructure as partial connection' with inspiration from Marilyn Strathern and Science and Technology Studies, this article proposes that database infrastructures are intrinsic to processes of organizing intra- and inter-organizational relations. Seeing infrastructure as partial connection brings our attention to the ontological experimenta…
Praktisk Ontologi: Verdener i STS og antropologi
I denne artikel diskuterer vi spørgsmået om, hvorvidt vi bebor mangfoldige verdener med udgangspunkt i en amoderne tilgang til videnskabs- og teknologistudier (science and technology studies eller STS), som vi kalder praktisk ontologi. På den ene side er denne analytiske position nært beslægtet med antropologiens nylige interesse for ontologi. På den anden side præsenterer vores tilgang en række vigtige forskelle. Disse forskelle vedrører ikke mi…
Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places
This article discusses how a small place - the polling booth - can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case - a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit inf…
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Organising Artificial Intelligence and Representing Work
This chapter explores effects of the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) on the organisation of work in the Danish Customs and Tax Administration in a situation where a machine learning algorithm was expected to make the work of customs officers more efficient. The chapter highlights how experiments with machine learning algorithms may redraw intra-organisational boundaries, responsibilities, as well as divisions and meanings of work. …
Trusting elections: Complexities and risks of digital voting in Denmark
It is often said that election processes depend on trust for their legitimacy. Trust is therefore crucial to the sustainability of democracy. It also seems clear that patterns and forms of trust in Western democracies are changing in tandem with digitalization. This paper explores some possible inflections of the concept of trust in the ‘age of digitalization’ by examining its articulation by computer scientists doing research on digital voting a…
Computer Science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Political science (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Ethnography (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works)