dr. MH (Mareike) Smolka

Mareike Smolka is Assistant Professor (tenured) in the Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation group at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and a Research Fellow at the Human Technology Center at RWTH Aachen University. In her research, she engages in inter-/transdisciplinary collaborations, stakeholder engagement and different types of ethnographic fieldwork to study which role responsible innovation, socio-technical imagination and ethical reflexivity can and could play in science and engineering. Her research areas are science & technology studies (STS), responsible innovation, empirical ethics, and, more recently, transition studies. Her project Studying and enhancing how AI researchers and developers imagine socio-technical systems was awarded with the Veni – Social Sciences and Humanities 2023 grant within the NWO Talent Program.

Mareike currently coordinates and teaches a course on Innovation and Transformation at WUR. She previously taught research methods, an introduction to STS, and philosophy of science to multidisciplinary student groups, including students in natural science and software engineering degrees. Her teaching is inspired by problem-based learning and interactive workshop formats. She has given workshops on Socio-Technical Integration Research, a method for conducting Socratic dialogues about the societal dimensions of science and technology development, in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and the United States, drawing on her extensive research experience with the method. She is also a certified practitioner of Reflexive Monitoring and Action and has gained experience in conducting and supervising a Transformative Vision Assessment project. In this project, she facilitated a transdisciplinary process to develop and write scenarios for the future of the high-tech innovation cluster NeuroSys.

Next to her research and teaching activities, she is a board member of the Centre for Unusual Collaboration, works as Associate Editor for the Journal of Responsible Innovation and has been actively involved in the German-speaking STS community, for example by co-initiating and co-organizing the STS-hub.de conference series.

For up-to-date information about Mareike Smolka's activities, publications, and projects, please check her website: https://mareikesmolka.carrd.co/

Students can find her thesis topics here:

• Building capacities for socio-technical imagination
• How do researchers understand, experience and practice responsibility?
• How do climate scientists choose Global Climate Models?