Research Projects

Epistemic agency for online and offline contexts

ESDIT (ESDIT – the ethics of socially disruptive technologies)is a 10-year research project taking place at a consortium of 6 Dutch universities with the aim to study how key philosophical and moral concepts are changed and challenged by new technologies (disruptive tech).
In this project, I focus on the change brought on to our epistemic lives by online social platforms, as this is intertwined with changes to our moral lives. Online social environments challenge how we relate to others as knowers in ways that are detrimental to our epistemic agency, both at the individual and group level.

Comet 2.0

4TU.CEE funded (2020-2023)

Through the COMET project, I am working together with Janna van Grunsven, Trijsje Franssen, Andrea Gammon, Sabine Roeser, and Neelke Doorn toward reconfiguring the future of engineering ethics education at TU Delft. The project is both retrospective and prospective: looking back at the successes and challenges from the last 20 years of integrating ethics into the curriculum at TU Delft, and identifying and proposing best practices for ethics education going forward.

Critical thinking for online environments

LEaDingFellows, Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND, individual grant (2020-2022)

In this project, I am looking at the material, technological, and social conditions for critical thinking. I am researching, among other things, collective thinking, affordances for thinking – such as digital devices and online technologies, the role of emotions in thinking, and hindrances from thinking. The overall aim of this project is to find ways of conceptualising the critical engagement with information online such as to empower regular users to tackle misinformation on online platforms, especially on Social Networking Sites.

Ethics Education for Engineers (SURF – 2019-2022)

This project (2019/2022) involves a collaboration between the TU/e (head university), TU Delft, UT and the WUR (under the flag of 4TU. Ethics) to develop materials for ethics education for engineers (Bachelor and Master).
Ethics education is a structural part of the courses of the 4 TUs and is largely based on “case-based exercises” (ethical considerations from different perspectives on applications of technologies). The aim of the project is to publish about 60 ethical case-based exercises in a clear, structured and open way for reuse in all courses of the institutions involved. The publication of the cases is online, through the open-source repository edusources.
Cases collected thus far can be found here