Univ.-Prof. Sarah Davies, BSc MSc PhD

Universitätsprofessorin

eMail: sarah.davies@univie.ac.at

Biography

Sarah R. Davies is Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies. Her work explores how science and society are co-produced – how society defines the conditions of scientific research, and how science is present in wider society. The ‘red thread’ of the digital and digitisation runs throughout. She has written about hackers and hackerspaces, how scientists experience the conditions of contemporary academia, and science communication formats such as science festivals or museums.

Her PhD (2008) was carried out at Imperial College London. Since then her career has been highly international: she has worked in the UK, US, Denmark (as a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow, before becoming associate professor) and Norway. She has published a number of books, including Hackerspaces (2017, Polity), Science Communication (2016, Palgrave, with Maja Horst), and Exploring Science Communication (2020, SAGE, with Ulrike Felt). She is a co-founder of the Science in Public conference series, sits on the scientific committee of the International Network for the Public Communication of Science and Technology, and has given more than 20 invited keynote talks and public lectures across Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria, the US, UK, Germany, and France since 2014.

Current Research Interests

Davies’ current work includes involvement in the European project QUEST and in the project ‘Understanding gender imbalances among university professors: the shaping and reshaping of epistemic living spaces’ (GENDIM), coordinated by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. More generally she works on:

• Critical studies of science communication, public engagement with science (including activism and protest), and amateur science;
• Public interactions with digitised science and technology, including science on social media, subversion and negotiation of 'datafication', and data subjectivities;
• The contemporary conditions of academic work and knowledge production
• Digitisation within scientific knowledge production, including studies of data deluges, the co-production of digital technologies and academic work, and mundane use of digital tools.