Andreas Birkbak

Roskilde University, Communication and Arts, Faculty Member

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Associate Professor in the Journalism and Democracy group at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark.

Associate Professor in the Techno-Anthropology Research Group and member of the Techno-Anthropological Laboratory (TANTlab) at Aalborg University Copenhagen (2016 - 2022).

PhD Fellow at Aalborg University 2013-2016, Copenhagen. Supervised by Torben Elgaard Jensen. Co-supervised by Noortje Marres and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

MSc Sociology 2012, University of Copenhagen. Supervised by Anders Blok.

MSc Social Science of the Internet, 2011, from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Supervised by Ralph Schroeder. Member of Green Templeton College.
Supervisors: Torben Elgaard Jensen, Anders Blok, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and Noortje Marres

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Papers by Andreas Birkbak

Actor-network theory and how to 'do ANT' with qualitative or digital methods

The Research Handbook on the Sociology of Science and Technology, 2025

This is my attempt at an accessible intro to actor-network theory (ANT). Back in 2023, I publishe... more This is my attempt at an accessible intro to actor-network theory (ANT). Back in 2023, I published an annotated Oxford bibliography with a tiny intro section followed by short descriptions of 150 selected ANT texts. In 2024, I was asked if I could write my own article-length intro to ANT. I am happy to share the result here. It is due to appear in the forthcoming Research Handbook on the Sociology of Science and Technology (Edward Elgar).

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Use yourself, kick yourself! Learning from a newspaper how (not) to do good public debate

Democratic Situations, 2022

According to theories of deliberative democracy, public debate is a cornerstone of democratic pol... more According to theories of deliberative democracy, public debate is
a cornerstone of democratic politics. It is in public debate that individuals are thought to emerge as citizens and contribute to the formation of public interests (Habermas 1989). How can this idealised notion of public debate be grounded and specified in concrete democratic situations? In the autumn of 2013, I enrolled in something called the ‘School of Debate and Critique’, initiated by the Danish newspaper Politiken. According to the organisers, the purpose of the school was to educate a ‘new generation’ of participants in ‘public debate’ in Denmark. I joined 149 other students below 30 years of age, selected based on written applications.

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Designing with Publics that Are Already Busy: A Case from Denmark

Design Issues

Design research has recently turned the attention to how designers contribute to the organization... more Design research has recently turned the attention to how designers contribute to the organization of publics when designing objects. This also raises the question of what kind of “good” public is being pursued. In this article, we argue for the importance of taking pre-existing normative projects into account to avoid approaching publics as yet another instantiation of “users” of design objects. We develop the argument by discussing our recent attempt at designing an online data visualization tool for public use. Instead of inviting potential future users of our tool to a design workshop, we decided to adopt an ethnographic interest in the existing “goods” that guided the publics for which we wanted to design. Based on explorations of three sites, we found our publics to be already busy with concerns that were both highly relevant to the data practices we were trying to facilitate, while at the same time overflowing and provoking our framing of the publics we were attempting to enga...

Whack-a-mole: En undersøgelse af falske nyheder og deres økosystemer

Politik

Vi argumenterer for, at falske nyheder skal forstås og undersøges empirisk i deres natur- lige h... more Vi argumenterer for, at falske nyheder skal forstås og undersøges empirisk i deres natur- lige habitat. Falske nyheder bør ikke blot håndteres som et spil whack-a-mole, hvor formålet er at slå det falske ned, hver gang det dukker op, som var det et muldvarpehoved i en spilleautomat, men derimod at forsøge at forstå de gange, muldvarpen graver.

Shitstorms, bobler eller sagsorienterede offentligheder? Digitale metoder og kontroverser på sociale medier

Dansk Sociologi

Kontroversen om planerne for en betalingsring i København afstedkom blandt andet en række sider p... more Kontroversen om planerne for en betalingsring i København afstedkom blandt andet en række sider på Facebook. Eksemplet er ikke enestående: Sociale medier lægger i disse år ofte brugerflade til folkelige protester og kontroverser. Sociologien har med digitale metoder fået en række værktøjer til at indsamle data om dem. Flere af de digitale teknikker er formet af et teoretisk udgangspunkt hos Bruno Latour. Artiklen undersøger, hvilke metodiske retningslinjer der følger af en Latour-inspireret forståelse af politik og demokrati. Først afsøges Latours inspirationskilder i den amerikanske pragmatisme. Dernæst diskuteres Noortje Marres’ bud på konsekvenserne for digitale metoder. Endelig analyseres betalingsringskontroversen for at give et eksempel på en undersøgelse med digitale metoder, der tager udgangspunkt i idéen om demokratisk offentlighed som noget, der opstår i anledning af konkrete problematiske sager. Analysen bygger på 4.500 posts og kommentarer fra syv forskellige Facebook-si...

(Re-)Appropriating Instagram for Social Research

Proceedings of the 7th 2016 International Conference on Social Media & Society - SMSociety '16, 2016

The politics of comparison in mediated publics

The World of EdgeRank: Rhetorical Justifications of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm

Computational Culture, 2015

Facebook pages as ’demo versions’ of issue publics

The Public and its Algorithms

Digitally mediated publics: The case of the Copenhagen ‘payment ring’ controversy

Digital technologies as baboon society made durable?

The Social Life of Data (Prototyping Controversies)

Infrastructural politics on Facebook

Expanding the visual register of STS

The edge-ranked public: Inquiring the political philosophy of an algorithm

Computational Culture, 2015

Infrastructural politics on Facebook: The case of the Copenhagen ’payment ring’ controversy

Towards a sociology of mediated publics

Tirsdagsanalyse: Facebook kan også styrke demokrati

Why all anthropology should be called techno-anthropology: On the consequences of a pragmatist understanding of technology

This chapter argues that if we follow a pragmatist understanding of humans and technologies, ther... more This chapter argues that if we follow a pragmatist understanding of humans and technologies, there is no reason to keep these phenomena strongly separated. The suggestion that all anthropology should be called techno-anthropology might provoke some readers, but it is first and foremost intended as an invitation to think in ambitious terms about what techno-anthropology might be(come). The main contribution of the chapter is to introduce Bruno Latour and John Dewey as techno-anthropologists. While these two thinkers are known for many other engagements, and wrote in different times, they share a pragmatist understanding of humans as fundamentally entangled in their technologies. Such a standpoint may sound trivial, but a lot of effort still goes into separating humans and technologies, both as a philosophical argument and as a critique of contemporary life. The chapter starts with an example of such efforts, namely Sherry Turkle's recent work on care robots and other new technologies that mediate human relationships. I move on to suggest that with Latour's notion of delegation, such mediation appears less alien. In order to develop further the consequences of Latour's techno-anthropologist moves, I turn to Dewey's understanding of technology as inquiry, a concept that deliberately ignores the physical/psychological dichotomy. The chapter concludes with a couple of empirical examples of how the pragmatist perspective might guide techno-anthropological analysis. Introduction: Keeping things separate The book to which this text seeks to contribute asks the question: What is techno-anthropology? Now, one way to start defining techno-anthropology is to outline what kind of answers might be provided by a techno-anthropological approach to things. While good answers are no doubt important, they are, however, also notoriously difficult to come by. Often a more useful place to start is by posing good questions. What questions might we ask with the help of techno-anthropology? As any rigorous English dictionary is happy to remind us, 'technology' derives from a combination of the Greek words tekhne and logia. While tekhne might be understood as art or craft, logia refers to systematic treatment, which together results in something like 'the systematic treatment of craft'. The second half of the new concept is 'anthropology', which derives from the Greek 'anthropos', meaning human being. Together with logia this second part then becomes 'the systematic treatment of human beings'. In combination, the notions of technology and anthropology put together in techno-anthropology might thus be taken to mean 'the systematic treatment of the relationship between craft and human beings'. At least if we assume that the hyphen means something like relationship (on this relationship, see also Børsen, this volume, and Botin, this volume).

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