Academic interests
Susanne Bauer’s research draws from STS as well as from history, sociology and anthropology of science. It has dealt in particular with health data infrastructures, the politics of categories, infrastructures and algorithms in epidemiology and environmental health. Susanne has longstanding research collaborations with scientists working on the aftermaths of nuclear exposures in post-Soviet countries.
Through combined archival and ethnographic work, Susanne's research asks for the epistemic infrastructures and the sociomaterial orderings enacted through scientific practices in the wet labs of the life sciences and in the dry labs of informatics. While based at University of Frankfurt/Main, they embarked on a collective project on a multispecies study of the intersections of life and technology at Frankfurt airport. Current projects engage feminist technoscience studies and postcolonial science studies and contribute to STS scholarship on algorithms, biopolitics and human-animal relations, postsocialism and technoscience east of what used to be the iron curtain.
Supervision and co-laboration interests (A-Z): airports, algorithms, box practices, biomonitoring, chemosociality, data centers, decolonial STS, digital fish, experimentalization, feminist technoscience studies, (post)genomics, haunted infrastructures, ionizing radiation, multispecies monitoring, noosphere, numbers in biomedicine, one health, ontological politics, promise of personalization, prototyping, queer ecologies, regulation, radioactive soils, scoring practices, temporalities, unruly bodies, virtual ethnography, wired natures, xenobiotics, yellowcake, zoonoses.
Courses taught
Since spring 2016: TIK4011 - Science and Technology in Politics and Society; Fall 2016/2017, Fall 2021: TIK4001 Lectures in STS Module; 2026: AI and the Politics of Technology (BA module).
Before coming to Oslo, Susanne Bauer taught STS and sociology, history and anthropology of science at Goethe University Frankfurt (2012-15), at Humboldt University Berlin as well as at Indiana University in Bloomington (fall 2011). Courses included Technoscience and Gender, Laboratory Ethnographies, Atomic Challenges, Cold War Science, Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of Science after Fukushima.
Background
Susanne Bauer came to STS from a background of environmental sciences and epidemiology. Having completed studies in environmental engineering and social sciences in Berlin (Germany) and Odesa (Ukraine), Susanne graduated with a Dipl.-Ing. (MSc) from TU Berlin in 1997 and then completed a doctorate in public health at University of Bielefeld (Dr PH) in 2004. As a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Science, Technology and Society in Graz (Austria) and in the Biomedicine on Display group at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (Denmark), they retrained in history and sociology of science, technology and medicine. From 2012 through 2016 Susanne held a junior professorship in sociology (habilitation equivalent) at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
Artistic projects: Co-curator of the exhibition “Split+Splice. Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen” (2008-10) and the experimental platform Paths of Knowledge/Wege des Wissens (2019-22; with Medical School Brandenburg Theodor Fontane).
Between 1997 and 2004 Susanne worked as environmental epidemiologist, participating in EU-funded projects researching the aftermath of Soviet nuclear programs in Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation and has maintained a range of project collaborations with colleagues in post-Soviet countries.
Positions held
Before joining the STS group at TIK, Susanne Bauer held a junior professorship (sociology of science) at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2012-15). Previous affiliations included research positions at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science (2009-2011) and at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin (2008-2009) and postdoctoral research as part of the “Biomedicine on Display” project at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (2005-09). Visiting professorships/fellowships included: CAPAS fellow, Heidelberg University (2025/26), guest researcher at CERCEC Paris and Brocher Geneva (2024), Visiting scholar at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2017, 2018) Visiting professor at Indiana University, Bloomington IN (2011), and senior fellow at IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (2014/15).
