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Societal IT systems development. Towards a discursive process-oriented multi-perspective approach to co-designing, -operating, -assessing, and -regulating societally relevant IT systems

Computational models of the social play an increasingly important role in political processes, from consulting to algorithmic governance. The dissertation project investigates the relation between the knowledge production practices underlying such models and the governance practices that make use of them. In doing so it aims to understand how different forms of modeling the social translate into different forms of governing.

In his dissertation project, Florian Irgmaier investigated the mechanisms through which science and technology affect societal imaginations of the possible and the feasible. To this end, he developed conceptual and theoretical foundations for a general sociology of the construction of horizons of the possible. On this basis, he identified the specific processes through which research and technologization change the conditions for thinking about the future: the trivialization of event sequences, the establishment of resolution-enhancing media of perception, and the constitution of new objects.