Inaugural lectures

Come to the joint professorial inaugural lecture on 6th March 2025 and hear Julia Kirch Kirkegaard and Anders Kristian Munk talk about the valuation struggles and controversies that new technologies sometimes create, how we can learn more about them, and from there create a better connection between technology and society.

Professor Julia Kirch Kirkegaard: Good energy – Struggles valuing energy transitions in Denmark

Climate change and its consequences have led to calls for accelerating and upscaling renewable energy developments. Yet, these advances and changes to existing energy infrastructures often produce controversy and bring with them unforeseen consequences of their own.

These controversies are tied to questions of what is ‘good’ and what counts as ‘good energy’. Key to understanding this are the tools, devices, and expertise that have been used in the design of our energy future.

After introducing the state-of-the-art on valuation struggles over the energy transition, the lecture sets out a new research direction, pointing towards a ‘sociology of devicing’, to critically probe the (often invisible) role of devices in valuing what kind of energy future should come to count. Empirical examples used are wind energy, energy islands, and Power-to-X

Julia Kirch Kirkegaard is professor of Social Studies of Energy, and focusses particularly on energy transition controversies.

Professor Anders Kristian Munk: Mapping technological problems in society

Technologies have always had the potential to change our lives. It is therefore natural that technology is something we discuss in society. Different people with different interests and values look differently on consequences, potentials, risks, and ethics.

It has never been more important to understand these differences. We live in a time where the pace of technological development and the complexity of the societal challenges it is meant to address make it difficult to grasp which actors are raising which questions and with what consequences. We need continuous and updated knowledge about technologies as wicked problems in society to understand, navigate, and prioritize the way we engage with techno-scientific controversies.

In his inaugural lecture, Anders Kristian Munk will talk about the mapping of these controversies and the opportunities currently created by data science and machine learning for a field of research that has traditionally been qualitatively oriented.

Anders Kristian Munk is a professor in computational anthropology and will especially focus on large language models and their challenges and potentials as research instruments.

The lectures will be in English.