Ingmar Lippert

My teaching philosophy is to support students in developing and nuancing their capacity to act as reflexive actors. My work aims to facilitate students’ learning so that as graduates they are equipped with a tactical, reflexive and critical capacity. In this way, I intend to further their capacity for engaging constructively with global situated socio-technical challenges (typically transdisciplinarily), ranging from digitalisation to nanotechnology, energy system transformation or biodiversity loss. STS, in my approach, serves to shape the design of both – content and method of teaching.

I hold a higher education teaching diploma from the IT University of Copenhagen and have been trained in, e.g., small group seminar teaching, large class teaching, MOOCs and integrating virtual learning platforms in teaching.

Living in a digital world? I develop courses that allow students to explore substantive empirical issues as well as analytics for engaging the ambivalences of the "digital society". We face simultaneously unprecedented seemingly seamless integration of digital "solutions" and "services", as well as challenges and frictions; we face also in parallel seemingly radical changes in IT as well as historical contingencies and continuities in the infrastructuring of information. I invite students to analyse these phenomena through a range of sociological theories and STS analytics of technology-in-practice.

For empirical research, methods are of key importance. I teach both the standards and the practice of qualitative research methods in the social sciences, always emphasising the important and critical relationship between standards and situated practice. In my courses, students engage, inter alia, with the ranges of imagining and achieving ethnography, interviews, document and visual analyses. I address how these methods can be mobilised to perform methodologies of actor-networking theorising and discourse analysis. The role of power relations within method matters not only in direct inter-human interactions, but also within research infrastructures. To address such power relations, students learn to be sensitised by feminist and other critical research philosophies. STS informs my understanding of methods in practice, thus emphasising the importance of semiotic and material agencies in thinking about, performing and putting into digital and otherwise material practice research methods.

Contemporary societies are claimed to be shaped technologically and by knowledge economies. I teach about the practices and imaginaries of disciplining knowledge, science and technology. And I introduce students to recent crises that led to significant transformations of the organisation of science, technology and epistemic practices. My teaching is sensitive to challenges emerging from critiques of disciplinarity (including current engagement with transdisciplinary knowledge production), of feminist and postcolonial theorising and recent troubles of "post-truth".

Given the central character of economic logics, contingencies and necessities in so-organising and shaping societies, I bring my research into financial infrastructures, global and situated economic relations and market infrastructures into teaching. In my courses, I emphasise the situatedness of economic practice, thus the non-determinism of economics and other knowledge forms about the economy. Historically, I underline the production and configuration of "the economy", using social science methods and analytics, students learn to problematise the practices which enact economics as well as economies.

Whilst arts and geology call out the age of the anthropocene, #Fridays4Future and Extinction Rebellion activists protest, I introduce students to the discursive development of both, the "environment" as well as various engagements with what we now consider environmental crises. My teaching is sensitive to the normative ordering of hegemonic discourses of sustainable development and ecological modernisation. To allow students an in-depth appreciation of the capacities of social theories of the environment and (un)sustainability, I employ specific problem sets that connect several relevant dimensions of socio-environmental relations (e.g. the exploitation of minerals and fuels to power the "ecosystem" of the cloud and smartphones, and then engaging with the environments imagined in apps for environmental activism or nature observation).