Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture (IPEC) News Blog

Tag: research area

Reminder: Seed Funding Applications Close April 12

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IPEC’s seed funding applications for both faculty and graduate students close on April 12, 2024.

Description: Small Grants are available to Michigan Tech Graduate Students to conduct preliminary research in areas that intersect with Policy, Ethics, and Culture, including but not limited to (1) Social Media and Society; (2) Human Machine Culture; (3) Justice and Security in Energy Transitions; (4) Ethics in STEM; and (5) Algorithmic Culture. Funds can be used for hourly pay, conference travel, or travel to collect data and access primary sources.

Contact: If you have any questions about whether or not your research project fits with IPEC’s research scope, reach out to IPEC’s Associate Director Soonkwan Hong at shong2@mtu.edu.

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Now Streaming: IPEC Presents Dr. Mark Rouleau

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In this episode of IPEC Presents, we examine our new season’s theme of ethics from a different perspective. Dr. Mark Rouleau brings with him insights from an IPEC-sponsored trip to Brazil. Mark participated in the Summer School on AI technologies for trust, interoperability, autonomy, and resilience in Industry 4.0. The summer school was a one-week hands on training hosted at the University of São Paulo focused on using automation techniques in Multi Agent System (MAS) environments to solve practical industrial problems. Topics covered through this hackathon style training included the following: Web of Things, Knowledge Graphs, Multi Agent Systems, and Responsible and Trustworthy AI.

Check out the podcast on Spotify!

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Now Streaming: Alexandra Morrison on IPEC Presents

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In our new season of IPEC Presents, we contemplate ethics as it relates to interdisciplinary research.

Our first guest this season is Dr. Alexandra Morrison, an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities here at Michigan Tech. Alexandra is also the Ethics and Philosophy minor Advisor, overseeing undergraduate students from all across campus. Her main research areas include 20th century Continental Philosophy, especially Phenomenology. She also publishes in Feminist Social and Political Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Technology and STEM Ethics pedagogy and is currently working on several interdisciplinary projects in STEM ethics, as well as a manuscript that makes a phenomenologically based critique of recent approaches to an ethics of AI.

Tune in on Spotify and Apple Podcast!

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Now Streaming: Stefka Hristova and Soonkwan Hong on IPEC Presents Podcast 

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The fourth episode of IPEC’s monthly podcast is now streaming on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Our guests, IPEC Director Stefka Hristova and Associate Director Soonkwan Hong discuss how their research relationship has developed over time and spanned university service-related projects, publication collaborations, and research development. Taking a critical perspective on AI and algorithms, we dive deep into the power relations at play in today’s techno cultural environment. Join us for a riveting discussion and learn how, as a general AI user, we can better educate and protect ourselves when interacting with these black box technologies.

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This Week’s IPEC Programming

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We have two great events scheduled this week!

  1. Guidance for (Land) Acknowledgement Statements in Ojibwa Homelands
    • CANCELED Thursday, November 30 from 5:00-6:30pm in Walker 120A
    • See event page for more information.
  2. Algorithmic Culture Brown Bag with Stefka Hristova and Soonkwan Hong
    • Friday, December 1 from 12:00-1:00pm in Peterson Library (Walker 3rd Floor)
    • Description: The sheer presence of algorithms poses existential questions about how deeply computational mechanisms have come to permeate everyday life. Join IPEC’s Director and Associate Director in discussing biases and unintended consequences of algorithms and AI.
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IPEC Seed Research Grant Application Now Open

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We are excited to announce the opening of our Seed Research Grant Application for IPEC members!

Seed Grants are awarded to individuals and groups to conduct preliminary research that will lead to a larger external grant proposal. Proposals should be in the following research areas without any priority: (1) Social Media and Society; (2) Human Machine Culture; (3) Justice and Security in Energy Transitions; (4) Ethics in STEM; and (5) Algorithmic Culture. 

Evaluation criteria include (a) Potential for future/continuous external funding;  (b) Previous research experience and productivity; (c) Scholarly merit of the proposed research project; (d) Potential for extended/continuous research program; (e) Potential for future collaborative work.

Interested applicants shall submit their applications by Feb. 16, 2024. The maximum funding amount is $5,000 with an expected average of $2,500.

Awardees are expected to submit a report upon completion of the project.

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Now Streaming: Dr. Jason Archer on IPEC Presents Podcast 

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The third episode of IPEC’s monthly podcast is now streaming on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

Our guest, Dr. Jason Archer, discusses his research in human machine communication and haptics. Jason is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Technologies here at Michigan Tech. Jason serves on the executive committee of IPEC and leads our Human Machine Culture research area. This research area focuses on the developing dynamics between humans and machines — the ways humans and communicative machines sense and make sense of the world together, and the cultural impacts of those formations.

Together, we talk about our next sense-revolution: touch. Listen now!

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Social Media and Society Research Area Updates

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Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT on Unsplash

With a new year (and semester) on the horizon, the Social Media and Society research area lead Rich Canevez has envisioned an exciting research agenda that you can be a part of! Applying to join the research area is easy, with our new google form.

New Research Activities

Rich Canevez (research area lead) just conducted field research at the Toronto Ukraine Festival in September, collecting data and recruiting participants to share their thoughts on the use of religious iconography to support Ukraine’s resistance. 

This project will continue throughout the year until the summer of 2024, and will include coordinated work across Ukrainian communities in St. Louis MO and Cleveland OH in the United States.

Research Area Scope

The penetration of social and digital media into almost every facet of social and political life has come with it the re-construction and re-imagining of those processes and practices. Peace and conflict, truth and fiction, and the material and discursive aspects of life find new practices and conceptions within these spaces. Although built within the cyber-spaces of the Internet, the impact of social and digital media information is equally about the physical lived realities of our world as it is about the digital lives we lead.


The Social Media and Society research area sets an inclusive lens on the impact that trans-national exchanges of information have on political, social, cultural, and personal life. The evolution of political life alongside the Internet has created not just novel modes of engagement of these processes, but also created new dimensions of conflict and war that challenge our previous conceptions of how these phenomena play out. The evolution of social and personal life alongside the Internet has provided new spaces for communities to construct meanings and world-views relevant to groups and the self, for better or for worse. 

The types of projects we consider are how information and cyber-spaces interact with war and conflict, how disinformation and misinformation manifests and spreads through social media platforms, and more generally the range of emergent topics concerning the impact of trans-national information exchange on societies world-wide.

Vision for 2024

We will be continuing our current projects looking at cyber activism and resistance in the Ukrainian defense against Russian aggression, and exploring the discourses around COVID-19 disinformation while continuing to grow our research area and overall presence at Michigan Tech University.

It is our goal in 2024 to extend our reach even further throughout MTU’s departments and divisions given the broad and wide ranging contributions from different perspectives on campus that could help grow this area through collaborations across research, events, and pursuing funding opportunities.

We also are intending to more closely communicate the research support we can offer to both undergraduate and graduate students alike who could be interested in contributing to ongoing research efforts, or even starting their own. It is our hope that, in accomplishing these objectives, we can move towards establishing ourselves as a research and collaboration lab under the IPEC umbrella.

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