Åsa Mäkitalo
Academic Interests
Åsa specializes in research what it implies to appropriate, collectively maintain, and develop institutional forms of knowing. The analytical focus is on participants' ways of organizing and coordinating activities including the sense-making practices that are triggered when new issues or dilemmas need to be attended to and transformed into accountable ways of working. Her interests can be summarized as follows:
- Technologies and the transformation of expertise
- The social organization of learning and knowing
- Remembering as an institutional practice
- Social, moral and cognitive accountability
- Forms of participation and co-production of knowledge
Current activities
- Infrastructures for partially digital citizens: Supporting informal welfare work in the digitized state. Funded by NordForsk (2021-cont.)
- Professional Trust and Autonomous Systems. Funded by Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (2020-cont.). Co-PI. (scientific leader: Jonas Ivarsson).
- Nordic Research Network on Digitalising Childhoods (DigiChild). NOS-HS, NordForsk (2019-cont.).
Completed projects
- Learning to engage with science and technoscientific issues in a digital landscape: The arrival of controversy mapping as a method for digital inquiry in Swedish upper secondary school. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2015-2019.
- Sea Change. Funded by EU H2020, 2015-2018.
Teaching
Åsa is engaged in the master program KULA. She has experience of teaching at all levels, especially in areas such as learning, communication and organization, research design, methodology and analysis.
Background
Åsa Mäkitalo has a background in human resource and organization studies. She received her PhD at the University of Gothenburg in 2002 with the dissertation: “Categorising Work: Knowing arguing and social dilemmas in vocational guidance”. In 2006-2018 she was a co-director of LinCS, a CoE in Research on Learning and IT. In 2010 she established the University of Gothenburg LETStudio – an interdisciplinary research environment with a focus on how technologies are intertwined in the transformation of knowledge and learning practices.
Publications
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Mäkitalo, Åsa; Bivall, Ann-Charlotte & Säljö, Roger (2021). Our business is problem-solving: Learning, remembering and inscriptions at the IT helpdesk. In Gunther, Kress; Selander, Staffan; Säljö, Roger & Wulf, Christoph (Ed.), Learning as Social Practice Beyond Education as an Individual Enterprise. Routledge. ISSN 9781003139188.
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Wiszmeg, Andréa; Lundin, Susanne; Mäkitalo, Åsa; Widner, Håkan & Hansson, Kristofer (2021). Transforming trash to treasure Cultural ambiguity in foetal cell research. Philosophy Ethics and Humanities in Medicine. ISSN 1747-5341. 16, p. 1–12. doi: 10.1186/s13010-021-00104-y.
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Lundin, Mona; Aanestad, Margunn; Mäkitalo, Åsa & Winthereik, Brit Ross (2021). Digital Services in the Nordic Welfare States: what about the Partially Digital User?
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Sadorge, Christopher; Nerland, Monika & Mäkitalo, Åsa (2021). Negotiating categories in design work. A study of a team developing a patient information system .