The Conference (2023)

June 16th, 2023
09.00-18.00 CET
Room: Aud Max, Remmen
Østfold University College
Halden, Norway

The conference is open for physical participation and will be live-streamed. Both attendance options are free, and both require registration.

“Responsible Technology and The Agonies of Reparation”

Professor Langdon Winner is a political theorist who focuses upon social and political issues that surround modern technological change. He is the author of Autonomous Technology, a study of the idea of “technology-out-of-control” in modern social thought, The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, and editor of Democracy in a Technological Society. Praised by The Wall Street Journal as “The leading academic on the politics of technology”, Mr. Winner was born and raised in San Luis Obispo, California. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley with a primary focus upon political theory.

Professor Winner is Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In the early 1990s he was research fellow at the Center for Technology and Culture at the University of Oslo, Norway. Mr. Winner is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology.

Professor Winner is perhaps best know for posing the question, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” and for answering, ‘Yes,’ the dimensions of which he has explored in numerous essays and lectures over the years. While some readers have focused upon particular illustrations in his discussion, for example the height of bridges on the Long Island Expressway in New York, Winner sees the matter far more broadly: a question about the basic compatibility (or lack of compatibility) between the desired character of democratic society and its technological devices and systems.

“Assessing the sustainability and carbon effectiveness of nuclear power”

Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University in the United States, where he is the Founding Director of the Institute for Global Sustainability, as well as Professor of Energy Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School in the United Kingdom. He is also University Distinguished Professor of Business & Social Sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Professor Sovacool works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to energy policy, energy justice, energy security, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation. More specifically, his research focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, the ethics and morality of energy decisions, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, and building adaptive capacity to the consequences of climate change.

His research has been endorsed by U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland, and the late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, among others. He was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), published in 2022, and he serves on the Board on Environmental Change and Society for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the United States. With much coverage of his work in the international news media, he is one of the most highly cited global researchers on issues bearing on controversies in energy and climate policy.