Lars Bo Andersen

Research and development areas

I am a researcher of children, (digital) technology and social change.  I am currently a senior associate professor (docent) at University College Copenhagen where I head the research program Digitization in School. I have also conducted research on international development, social work and project and process management (see a very short CV or my linkedin profile).

My research interests generally/currently fall within four categories:

1. Agency and empowerment of children. This is the defining interest for my research. It grew from a frustration with the widespread belief in children as ‘digital natives’ and the idea that technology - in itself - can empower against social, economic or political inequality. But it is (nonetheless) also based on an optimistic belief in the empowering potential of technologies for children (and my own personal experiences with technologies properly echoes somewhere behind this optimism as well).
2. Educating (cyborg) children. Most of my current research is on technology education of both schoolteachers and children/students. In Denmark, most work in this direction is conducted under the term technology comprehension (teknologiforståelse). A special attention in this regard is to research (trying to bridge) the gap between what schools teach (subject matters) and how they teach (their pedagogy and didactics) on the one hand and the actual life that children already live with smartphones, social media, playing on the computer, etc. on the other.
3. Technological sustainability in the Anthropocene. Or pulling down tech from the cloud and messing it up with earthly affairs (which it has been all along). This is a new research area I am trying to venture into with good colleagues. It basically consists in researching how schools and educations may help create awareness about digital technologies as part of ecosystems of minerals and metals, humans and labor, business models and revenue streams, and massive amounts of energy and heat generation. It is really strange that we consider apps and algorithms as immaterial beings in the cloud.
4. Everything as ontology. I have great affection for Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledge is stuck on repeat inside my head. This implicates an interest in researching the real-world empirical existence of concepts such as objectivity, technology, science, etc., and what such real-world existence implicates and affords (and for who).

All publications can be downloaded full text from my list of publications.