 Okay, Katherine, so thank you for joining me for this interview. For people who don't know you, can you give us a short list of your academic career? Yeah, so I'm an anthropologist by profession and I've been working on learning in relation to culture and technology for the past 25 years. And I am based at Aarhus University, Department of Education, where I'm heading a research programme for future technologies, culture and learning. Can you tell us shortly what is the real project and what was your role in it? Yeah, first of all I was the idea generator and I was also the coordinator. I wanted to work on robotics from a more humanistic perspective, so to speak. Just to give you one example, we followed a healthcare robot. We followed several, but in one of the cases, they had made something for people who had had a stroke to train with a robot. That's very clever and very good, a very interesting technology. But they hadn't thought about how the individual user who has had a stroke and therefore is kind of lame, would be able to attach this robot to his or her body. I think it's really important that we as humanists and social scientists take it upon us to go in and take the lead in projects that are also developing technologies and affecting people's lives through AI systems, through robotics, through a lot of other technical devices. We could also take in now the social media, that is another area, because we have a lot to offer in terms of doing things better. In the global challenges presented in pillar two of the Horizon Europe, the EU commission is asking for projects to address what they call predefined and policy driven challenges. So how did you go about understanding and addressing these political elements in your project under the Horizon 2020? So the first thing was that we really wanted to do this kind of research, which means that we were looking for calls that would help us do that. We all know that it's really difficult for people in the humanities and social sciences to get funding for their many good ideas and projects. And so we have to be really, really alert in looking for opportunities that will help us make the research that we find is important and it's not easy. So the way we did it was simply reading over the calls that was addressing issues that tied up to something that had to do with technology. And of course we have to also be aware that when we do that we are so to speak on foreign ground because these calls are not made for us necessarily. So we have to really look at the calls and see is there a kind of little crack where we could try and move in with our new ideas that not even the people who created the calls had envisioned. So we have to move beyond in a way what they envisioned and at the same time really try to understand why they made the call they did. That's a very difficult task and balance, but as we have shown it can be done. So the important thing here is that I had decided beforehand I'm not interested in being what we call the token humanist or the token social sciences in these projects, in these technology development projects. Of course as humanist and social sciences we are sometimes invited in, but that would be to maybe look things over from an ethical perspective. And I wanted to be in the forefront with our approach. So the initiative was mine. But of course we needed people from the technical sciences with us there because they have the expertise in developing these technologies. So of course it was really important to have engineers with us who knew how to do robotic work and artificial intelligence. And we also wanted to have some ideas about the economic impact that we contributed in this project. So I went out to look for partners in engineering and economics to help us out with this approach. And that is also difficult because you can't just approach any engineer with these issues. You really have to have somebody who's sympathetic to the idea and can accept to be led by an anthropologist in such a project. That is not easy for all engineers because they are usually the ones leading the research. So you have to look for people who are willing and find it interesting to work from these perspectives. And what we clearly showed, we made a big publication together called Perspectives on Robots, is that you can actually work together across these lines. And it's not that it's either you are in the engineering way of thinking or in the social sciences humanistic way of thinking. You can learn from each other. That was the whole idea of the project. And we could also show that you can learn. First of all, as I said before, it's really, really hard in the humanistic and social sciences to get funding because we are many and we are very good. And the funding resources are meager. But also I think we have a kind of mission. We need to do this because we need to create a better society. Also in areas like climate change, for instance, we need to understand better the relation between technology and people. Technology in itself will not solve the problems we are facing for us. And for me personally, it's been fantastic to be the coordinator of these projects. It's a lot of hard work. There's a lot of issues to deal with as always in projects. But the thing is that we are actually able to make ground breaking research, basic research, even if it's applied calls. If we can think out of the box when we make our applications. And of course, on the other side, if the people who are evaluating us are willing to think with us. And that's luckily the case sometimes, not always. But in that respect, we are like any other applicants for research funding.