Department of Management, Society and Communication

Associate Professor Nanna Bonde Thylstrup receives ERC grant

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Associate Professor at MSC, has received one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grants for her new research project, 'Data loss: the politics of disappearance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies' (DALOSS).

With the new project, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup will explore the many, as yet not fully understood, aspects of everyday data loss, including how the loss of data is defined and how it is perceived.

We are taught to believe that we live in an age of data accumulation, and that it is this accumulation that enables both the scientific advances and political and ethical challenges we face today. Yet, the premise of Thylstrup’s project is that every technological revolution also always entails a loss.

Empirically, the project will focus on three archival regimes of loss: web archives, public administrations and community archives. Attending to loss as a structural and generative condition of datafication will help us understand not only how, but also why data-driven societies “forget”. What is at stake in the research agenda of DALOSS is two-fold: an immediate challenge to visions of datafication as simple progress or accumulation, and a more fundamental deepening of knowledge of how new digital regimes of loss generate future ethical and political relations.    

The project will run for 5 years and will involve a project team of 4 scholars: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, one PhD and two postdocs. The advisory board consists of Louise Amoore (Durham University), Orit Halpern (TU Dresden), Geoffrey Bowker (UC Irvine), Taina Bucher (University of Oslo) and Niels Brügger (Aarhus University).

The ERC Starting Grants are funded by the European Research Council, the European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. The Starting Grants are given to ‘excellent younger scientists, who have 2 to 7 years’ experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas’ (read more on the ERC website).

Read more about Nanna Bonde Thylstrup’s ERC grant in this CBS News item. For further information, contact Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, nbt.msc@cbs.dk.

MSC PhD Fellow, Frederik Schade, receives the 2022 Fonnesbech PhD Award

At the annual CBS Award ceremony, Frederik Schade, PhD Fellow at MSC, was presented with the Fonnesbech PhD Award 2022. The Award, which was given to Frederik Schade in recognition of his ‘talent and potential for conducting high quality research on phenomena of significant societal importance, and his ability to publish his research in renowned international journals’, was presented in collaboration with Grosserer Anders Fonnesbech Legatfond.

The focus of Frederik Schade’s research concerns the emergence of “digital responsibility” as a societal and organizational norm.  As we become

increasingly aware of the problems and potential dangers associated with mass digitalization (e.g., through the Snowden revelations, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and other incidents), governments and organizations are becoming increasingly preoccupied with defining and realizing responsible praxis in this area. Frederik’s work thus investigates how key norm-setting institutions in a Danish context arrive at particular notions of “responsibility” and modes of enforcing “responsible” conduct in the market to highlight existing concepts of responsibility and allow for new ways of thinking and deliberating on the problem of digital responsibility.

The Fonnesbech Award provides Frederik with a fourth year of PhD funding and will allow him to immerse himself in his research as he finalizes his thesis and develops key findings into a set of research papers.

The Department of Management, Society and Communication

The department came into existence on 1 January 2017 as a result of the merger of the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management and the Department of International Business Communication. Read about MSC's research profile here.

MSC moved into its new premises in Dalgas Have in August 2017. As one of CBS' largest department, it occupies most of the second floor of the building.