My name is Thea Sofie Engstrøm Vejlin, and I am an anthropologist working with questions of digitalization and the development and use of emerging technologies. I am especially interested in practices that unsettle taken-for-granted norms and institutional logics, moments where people act or imagine in ways that do not quite “fit the boxes.” My work aims to unfold these practices on their own terms and consider what they might tell us about contemporary ways of being human.

This interest has shaped the direction of my PhD project, which I am now entering the final year of, supervised by Andreas Roepstorff and Rikke Toft Nørgaard. Over the past two years, I have explored the development and implementation of AI through the idea of speculative engagement with opacity, examining educational and artistic settings where the obscure and enigmatic aspects of AI are not treated as obstacles to overcome but as something made workable in practice.

In the education sector, I have followed “AI frontrunners” who teach both future and practicing schoolteachers how to work with various forms of AI in exploratory ways. By examining how experimental learning environments invite technology to co-create speculative possibilities, I explore how the tension between logics of expertise and logics of ignorance becomes a generative force for reimagining education. This generativity opens questions about learning, knowing, and entangling with technologies, other species, and different forms of life.

As part of my research, I collaborate with the artist Jacob Juhl to stage speculative encounters with the other-than-human in digital and analogue formats, creating situations where the opacity of the 'otherness' becomes something people can engage and reflect with. 

Contact:
Thea Sofie Engstrøm Vejlin
School of Culture and Society
Department of Anthropology
Moesgård Allé 20, 1483, 549
8270 Højbjerg
tsse@cas.au.dk