The aim of the blog
4TU.Ethics center is a world leader in the ethics and philosophies of technology research and practices. For more than twenty years, members of the center have been conducting cutting-edge research and are committed to holding technological developments and the commonly held assumptions that surround them up to critical scrutiny. There remains, however, a gap between the conviction behind this commitment and the researchers' ability to disseminate the products of their critical attitude throughout society. We see the role of philosophers and ethicists of technology as extending beyond academic publishing. Our writing and communication skills can be directed towards reaching out to broader publics by translating theoretically, conceptually and/or normatively identified socio-technological challenges into concise problems and disentangling their complexity.
4TU.Ethics Independent Blog serves as a platform for addressing such ethical and societal technology-related questions to a wider audience using accessible, inclusive, and creative language. The main goal is to provide a platform enabling all 4TU.Ethics members to generate and increase visibility around their research and the research of the 4TU.Ethics centre and engage with an audience generally interested in the centre's research.
This expands the focus beyond an inner circle of researchers within the field to include, for example, journalists, scholars, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and practitioners lacking a background in ethics of technology. The blog functions as a platform for exchanging different points of view and is open to blog posts about 4TU.Ethics members' research, opinion pieces, quick reactions, or thoughts on current developments and topics at the heart of the public discussion. These thought-provoking discussions enable the center and its members to engage in the public dissemination of knowledge by covering interesting and societally relevant debates.
Blog writing guidelines
Required:
- Use short paragraphs
- Make sure your language is suitable for a wider audience.
- Make sure readers of the 4TU ethics blog (people interested in tech/philosophy, but potentially with limited background) can easily understand your story.
- Use headings and subheadings
- Include list of references at the end (if applicable)
Optional:
- Provide a title image. Also feel free to provide images throughout the text (always include image sources!). If you do not provide an image, we will add one ourselves.
Submit to the blog
If you are a 4TU member, you can upload the blog yourself to the website and we will copy-edit it before publishing, in the manual below we explain how to do so. If you are not a member (or you just prefer not to upload yourself), please email the blog to us via blog@ethicsandtechnology.eu.
The Editorial Team
Anna Melnyk is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ethics & Philosophy of Technology section at TU Delft, the Netherlands. Her current research is a part of the ERC Advanced Grant research project "Design for Changing Values in Socio-Technical Systems," where she explores changing values in the course of the transition to community energy systems. Anna's role in the editorial team is to initiate collaboration with other 4TU projects and teaching efforts as well as to organise blog post series.
Anne Marte is a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology where she works on cyber resilience and technological citizenship. As a member of the 4TU Blog editorial board, she makes sure each blog is accompanied with great images.
Céline is affiliated with the Philosophy & Ethics Group at Eindhoven University where she works as a PhD student. Within the editorial team, she organizes blog post series and drafts her own original blog posts.
Isaac is the blog's copy editor. Isaac is in the final stages of his PhD studies at the Section of Philosophy at Twente University.
Mariska supports the blog not only as a member of the 4TU.Ethics coordination team, but also by maintaining the website, promoting the blog within the 4TU.Ethics community, and by integrating the blog initiative in the activities of the 4TU.Ethics graduate school. Mariska is a PhD candidate at the section of Philosophy at Wageningen University.