Academic interests
Ana Delgado is professor in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Her main research interest is on how people get to know, make and own life, in academic environments but also in activism and in grassroots experimentalism. She has a long standing interest in the ways in which science and technology are made public: in public engagements with science, activism, public policy and through infrastructures. Her current research is organized along two lines: 1. Biodiversity, data and digital commons. In this line of research she investigates how biodiversity is turned into digital data and the implications for governance. She has focused on bioprospecting practices for marine microorganisms, and notions of science as public good at play within these practices; 2. Public engagement with microbial-based biomaterials. Here the research focuses on design, prototyping and grassroots experimentality. Ana’s research has been concerned with how futures are enacted in the present, particularly through infrastructuring and bio-design practices. Her research combines resources from STS, Social Anthropology and Political Theory.
Ana has led and collaborated in national and international research projects since she completed her post-doc in 2013. She has a long-standing experience in interdisciplinary projects in which she collaborates with scientists in the life sciences, in design and architecture. Ongoing projects are:
In the Res Publica project (2017-2022, Research Council of Norway), Ana interrogates science as public good, by studying how biodiversity is turned into data to be deposited in global data bases. She has analysed the datafication of the marine microbial biodiversity in Norway in terms of bioextractivism.
In the CoPol project (2021-2025, Research Council of Norway), Ana collaborates with Norwegian and international partners to study the use of contact tracing technologies in public policy by focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway. Her interest is on what happens to data after the pandemic. She is interested databases, data displacement, de-territorialization and jurisdictions.
In BREAD (2019-2022, Research Council of Norway), she explores how people use fermentations as a technology for food preservation, and how they share the experiments that they carry out at home through text-devices in social media. She is studying grassroots documentation and experimental practices in the context of the probiotic turn.
In the FUNGATERIA project (2022-2025, European Commission), Ana lead the work to develop participatory methodologies for the design of microbial based biomaterials.
Supervision and collaboration interests: human-microbial relations, public engagement with science and technology, design, biodiversity, infrastructures and data, databases, digital commons and ownership, public good, political ecology, activism, grassroots experimentality, bioeconomy, green transitions.
Courses taught at TIK
TIK 4001- Module 2: Introduction to Science and Technology Studies
TIK4040 - Research and Design Seminar
TIK 4031– Methods in science, technology and innovation studies (starting in spring 2023)
TIK 9011- Science and Technology Studies: A PhD introduction
Ana is also responsible for a research ethics course for PhD students at the Faculty of Social Sciences – SV9104
Background
Ana Delgado has a background in philosophy and social anthropology. She holds a Master Degree in agroecology and DEA (Certificate for Advance Studies) in ecological economics, with a focus in political ecology. She gained a PhD degree in environmental sciences (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and theory of science (University of Bergen). Her PhD thesis is an ethnographic study on how the production and diffusion of ecological knowledge and technology within rural movements in Brazil. By focusing on seeds as a site of negotiation and contestation, she explored the (partial) turn of a major social movement from Marxism to Environmentalism.
Positions held
Before she moved to Oslo, Ana was a researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Science and the Humanities at the University of Bergen, where she was the PI for the Project ReDig (Research Council of Norway). She was a post-doctoral fellow at the same institution (2010-2013). She has also been a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (2009-2012). As a post-doctoral fellow she participated in several projects on the governance of emerging technologies such as Technolife (FP7) and RSB: Reflexive Systems Biology (Research Council of Norway), among others.
Ana has been a visiting researcher at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (2005), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2006), and Arizona State University (2011). She has been a visiting scholar at the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies program at the University of Edinburgh (February-April 2016).
Tags: Science and Technology Studies, Politics of knowledge and technology, publics, infrastructure, sharing and ownership, open science, bioeconomy,futures, social movements, microorganisms, biodiversity, data, bioeconomy, extractivism