PhD thesis by Valeria Borsotti
Supervisor: Professor Pernille Bjørn

The PhD defense was a success! We had 60 attendees in person and an additional 33 participants online. It was a fantastic event that showcased the significance and importance of the research.

This PhD project is based on a three-year ethnographic engagement in the Department of Computer Science at UCPH (DIKU) and explores challenges and opportunities for equity and accessibility in computer science. To do action-oriented research on equity is to make trouble, by identifying and disrupting normative structures and dynamics, and by giving visibility to bottom-up, collective strategies for change that fall outside ‘the norm’.

This research is both norm-critical and norm-creative. It examines how norms and values are (re)produced in institutional spaces through sociomaterial practices, data and artefacts (norm-critical analysis), and it generates change at different scales, within and without the department (norm-creative mode).