Graduate School

Date: 25-27 November, 2026
Location: Hagaberg folkhögskola, Erik Dahlbergs väg 60, 152 27 Södertälje. NOTE! All inclusive: lodging and meals!

Format: Lunch on day 1, with collective dinner at the end of day 1, full day of classes on day 2, and finalize with the class in the morning of day 3, ending at lunch.
Examination: Oral presentation and a self-reflective essay
Tech moment: With the workshops, we intend to help course participants explore the technologies through hands-on ‘making & doing.’
International element: TBA
Course coordinator: Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Cormac McGrath, Stockholm University
Registration: Before September 1st 2026

Course information

The course introduces the central tenets of the postphenomenological approach developed by Peter-Paul Verbeek and colleagues based on the work conducted by philosopher of science and technology Dan Idhe. The course consists of lighting talks, reading seminars, and workshops. The lighting talks introduce the historical roots of the postphenomenological approach and the main concepts and methods. In the reading seminars, the course participants discuss the course literature from different research positions and disciplinary backgrounds. In the workshops, the course participants in groups work with selected futuring techniques to create speculative scenarios where they apply and reflect on technology mediation of human perception and action as well as embodiment relations, hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, and background relations.

The course aims to support students in understanding the role that technologies play in human experience and existence. It also intends to help students to learn apply conceptual tools to move beyond the modernist subject-object dichotomy and embrace the fundamental intertwinement of humans and technologies.

Literature: Verbeek, P-P. (2011). Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1-5 and chapter 8.

Idhe, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld. From garden to earth. Indiana University Press. Chapters 2, 3 and 5.

Selected articles:

Aydin, C., González Woge, M., & Verbeek, P. P. (2019). Technological environmentality: Conceptualizing technology as a mediating milieu. Philosophy & Technology, 32(2), 321-338. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-018-0309-3

Benjamin, J. J., Berger, A., Merrill, N., & Pierce, J. (2021, May). Machine learning uncertainty as a design material: A post-phenomenological inquiry. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-14).                 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445481

Farazouli, A., Cerratto-Pargman, T., Bolander-Laksov, K., & McGrath, C. (2024). Hello GPT! Goodbye home examination? An exploratory study of AI chatbots impact on university teachers’ assessment practices. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(3), 363-375. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02602938.2023.2241676

Kudina, O., & Verbeek, P. P. (2019). Ethics from within: Google Glass, the Collingridge dilemma, and the mediated value of privacy. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(2), 291-314. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0162243918793711

Longo, A. (2025). Algorithmically mediated judgment: an arendtian perspective on political subjectivity in social media. AI & SOCIETY, 40(6), 4905-4918. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02230-z