Prof. Dr. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
Prof. Dr. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences
ETH Zürich
Ethik, Technologie u. Gesellschaft
Additional information
Research area
● Social and political aspects of digital technologies and computing
● Identity, selfhood, and citizenship in technological societies
● Ethics of technology
● Comparative cultures of innovation
Current research projects
● What are the constitutions of the human in the information age?
Completion of book manuscript titled Digital Demos: Becoming Human with Computers, a comparative study of American, French and Soviet computer literacy and computer culture programs in the 1960s - 1980s that traces the transformation in citizens' ways of knowing and being with public computing in response to the coming of the information society.
● How does the Silicon Valley imaginary of innovation travel and get enacted in cities around the world?
Completion of a collaborative and comparative edited volume about the Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary of innovation comprising eleven city-case studies. Project funded by the US National Science Foundation, in collaboration with Prof. Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard University) and Prof. Sebastian Pfotenhauer (TU Munich).
● How does the concept of human dignity and its significance as the basis for human rights co-evolve with changing technologies for calculating human worth over the course of the 20th century and into the present age of Artificial Intelligence-based techniques?
A historical, ethnographic, and critical-legal inquiry into the co-production of the meaning and institutionalization of human dignity with identification and computation technologies. Examined across three eras: Universal Declaration of Human Rights/punched cards; first data protection laws of the 1970s/state and public computing; General Data Protection Regulation and AI governance frameworks since the 2010s/algorithmic risk-assessment scores. Supported in 2021-2022 by the Sorbonne Université - Paris IAS Chair on "Major Changes" research fellowship at the Institut d'Études Avancées in Paris.
● How does the ethics of digital technologies work in practice? How can STS researchers and STS perspectives support technical practitioners in ethical sense-making, scrutiny, and action?
A series of interdisciplinary and pedagogical research-engagements about the meaning and practices of ethics with digital, data, computing, and AI technologies, their practitioners, and publics. Supported in part by the Mozilla Foundation Responsible Computer Science Challenge (2018-2021) and the Academic Data Science Alliance (2020-2022).
For more related projects, see also the research of the Ethics, Technology and Society Group led by Prof. Boenig-Liptsin.
Since September 2022, Margarita Boenig-Liptsin is a tenure-track Assistant Professor for Ethics, Technology and Society in the Department of Humanities, and Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zürich. She is trained in the field of Science, Technology and Society (from the Harvard STS Program) and holds a PhD in History of Science (Harvard University) and in Philosophy (Université Paris-Sorbonne).
Her research examines transformations to human identity and citizenship in relation to information technologies across time and cultures. She also studies the meaning, practices, and institutions of ethics and democratic governance in contemporary technological societies.
From 2018 - 2021 she was the Director of the Human Contexts and Ethics Program in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley and Lecturer in the History Department. At Berkeley, Boenig-Liptsin led a team that developed the Human Contexts and Ethics (HCE) component of data science education.
In 2021-2022 Boenig-Liptsin held the Sorbonne Université - Paris IAS Chair on "Major Changes" research fellowship at the Institut d'Études Avancées in Paris.
She teaches about the relationship between technology, power, democracy, and ethics with a foundation in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) to students in both technical and social science/humanities fields. Boenig-Liptsin aspires to translate social science theory and methods for students of all backgrounds. She values building connections between engineering and social sciences by bringing together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates into a community of scholars focused on issues of technology and society in ways that connect to the expertise and local needs of communities in Zürich, Switzerland, and Europe.
CV PDFCourse Catalogue
Spring Semester 2025
| Number | Unit |
|---|---|
| 851-0456-00L | Research in Ethics, Technology and Society |
| 851-0457-00L | Foundations of Science, Technology and Society (STS) |
| 862-0088-16L | Science and Technology Studies Colloquium (FS 2025) |