science and technology studies

francis
lee

Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Department of Media Technology, Södertörn University.

studying science & technology in society

I study how AI, algorithms and digital infrastructures change the way knowledge is made — and how they sort and value the world.

ai, algorithms & data

What happens to knowledge when algorithms and AI help produce it?

I follow how researchers and organisations build, use and come to trust AI systems — from machine learning in biomedicine to AI-generated synthetic data.

Now: I lead a research group on synthetic data in WASP-HS, Sweden’s national program on AI and society.

→ writing on ai
→ writing on algorithms

classification & valuation

How do classifications and values put the world in order — and what falls outside them?

I study how classification and valuation work in practice, often together: how disease surveillance sorts the known from the unknown, how data sets decide what counts as normal, and how scientific, economic and ethical values are weighed against each other.

Recent: “Detecting the unknown in a sea of knowns” (Science in Context) and “The Politics of Valuation” (Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies).

→ writing on classification
→ writing on valuations

featured writing

  1. 2025 Computational universalism, or, Attending to relationalities at scale
  2. 2025 The practices and politics of machine learning: A field guide for analyzing artificial intelligence
  3. 2025 The ontological politics of synthetic data: Normalities, outliers, and intersectional hallucinations