Anne Beaulieu
Research and Publications
Keynote- Search engines beyond search: questions for a critical knowledge infrastructure
Conference of the Search Engines and Society Network, Hamburg
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Abstract: Search engines play a powerful role in ordering knowledge and in shaping interactions with data, sources or documents. The current dominance of ‘search’ has been well documented and various facets (relevance, optimization, ranking, bias) have been examined and refines in sophisticated ways. But as search engines become further embedded in layered knowledge infrastructures, it is all the more important to unearth how search shapes knowledge needs and how these needs are met. In this presentation, I want to share a number of questions to explore important assumptions of search engines: It is possible to imagine other functions for search engines, besides supporting retrieval? Can a search engine succeed otherwise than through best match? Can assumptions be foregrounded so that search engines are more reflexive–at what cost and with which advantages? How do conversational interfaces increase the urgency of questioning these assumptions? These questions can spur new interactions and explorations across lines of work, connecting epistemology and design, ethics and computation, politics and indexing.
Prof. dr. Anne Beaulieu holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Knowledge Infrastructures at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is co-author of Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021), of Smart Grids from a Global Perspective (Springer, 2016), and of Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2012). She also chairs the editorial board of the Liveable Futures book series at Amsterdam University Press. In 2023-24, she was joint fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and of the Data Science Centre at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-coordinated the PhD training network of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). This presentation is based on her book Revealing Relations: Knowledge Relations for Liveable Futures (Bristol University Press, 2026).
On Sabbatical Leave April-August 2025
The coming months will be spent in Moncton, Canada. This stay will be the opportunity to reconnect to my hometown, to share some insights on non-conventional research outcomes with colleagues at the Université de Moncton and to finalise my book manuscript Revealing Relations.
Leergang Digitaal Leiderschap
Do you work as a director, manager, team leader or supervisor and leadership is expected of you on many fronts, but are you wondering what constitutes good leadership when it comes to digitalization? To answer this question, Campus Fryslân of the University of Groningen has developed a Digital Leadership course, for executives who want to strengthen their digital strategies, knowledge and skills. More information and registration details are available on the website of Campus Fryslân.
Fellowship at IAS in Amsterdam
Beaulieu appointed as Fellow 2023-2024 at Institute for Advanced Studies, Amsterdam
Prof Dr Anne Beaulieu will explore how interfaces can support epistemic diversity in the context of a joint Fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and the Data Science Centre (DSC) of the University of Amsterdam.
The fellowship will foster collaboration with colleagues from the UvA, participation in IAS and DSC activities and a contribution to IAS’ and DSC’ programming through a kick-off lecture and interdisciplinary meetings on interfaces.
Contributing to beneficial disruptions in knowledge production
Anne Beaulieu will explore whether creating new kinds of interfaces can help diversify users and do more justice to existing diversity in data. This work will contribute to the efforts of the IAS and DSC to explore how the science system can come up with surprising theories, wild ideas, new methods and innovative techniques that help to deal with major societal challenges and wicked problems. The hope is that novel knowledge infrastructures that include better interfaces can support team science and interdisciplinary work, and contribute to beneficial disruptions.
Building Knowledge Infrastructures for Liveable Futures
Current knowledge infrastructures serve a narrow set of users and purposes. Data intensive knowledge infrastructures tend to increase homogeneity and standardisation rather than complexity and diversity. They also tend to erase friction and elide omissions in data, and to foreground data as seamless, presenting themselves as maximally productive. In addition, current knowledge infrastructures focus on interoperability, automation and transparency and aim to organize data in ways that primarily enable computation (Peterson and Panofsky 2021), whereas we know that digital and data-intensive environments can also support uses other than algorithmic learning and classification, such as exploration or projection (Wouters and Beaulieu 2006; Wouters et al. 2013). These alternative approaches are important to cultivate. When values such as heterogeneity, diversity and recomposition come to the fore, data intensive resources can powerfully support the needs of a greater variety of users and concerns (Whitelaw and Smaill 2021; Beaulieu 2024), create new digital public spaces (Anderson 2013), and increase their potential in helping to address wicked problems.
Join Campus Fryslân
Are you an expert working on climate with a strong sense of data issues? Do you want to help students learn to navigate climate data and build better interfaces? The Knowledge Infrastructures Dept at Campus Fryslân is recruiting: we have an opening for Assistant Professor of Climate and Data Studies (1 FTE)
More details here: https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S0009YUP
Applications can be submitted until 16 April via the website. Questions about the position can be addressed to me at j.a.beaulieu@rug.nl
Laudatio Dina Friis
On 22 June 2022, Dina Friis defended her dissertation entitled Theorising Ambiguity: telling deliberately equivocal stories at Leiden University. I had the honour of giving a laudatio on this occasion.
Knowledge Infrastructures @EASST2022
Together with colleagues from the Knowledge Infrastructures Department of Campus Fryslân, we will present, organise and launch at the upcoming EASST conference in Madrid, from 6-9 Julu 2022
6 July 14:00 – 15:30
Room N106
Panel 010. ForeSTS
476. Imagining and evaluating olive orchards in Ege
Efe Cengiz, Anne Beaulieu, Carol Garzon-Lopez. Imagining and Evaluating Olive Orchards in Ege
6 July 14:00 – 15:30
Room N107
Panel 036 36 – CARE-FUL DATAFIED FUTURES AND TECHNOPOLITICS OF CARE, EASST 2022, Madrid July 2022
479. Selen Eren and Anne Beaulieu. To create better worlds: care for birds living now or care for data serving future?
6 July 15:30 – 17:00 Room N117 –
Panel 048. Transdisciplinary research: how to stay with the trouble and enable co-larning?
Anne Beaulieu, Sarah Feron, Andrej Zwitter. Enabling Transdisciplinary Work: insights from a newly established faculty Campus Fryslân
7 July
15.30-17.00
Room N102
Panel 051. Methodological experiments in STS: exploring digital and (quali-) quantitative methods
Anne Beaulieu, Respondent
8 July
12:30-14:00
Handbook and anthropology of technology: book presentation
Short presentation on chapter
Beaulieu, Anne. 2022. Organising Knowledge for Sustainable Futures. In Maja Hojer Bruun, Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Cathrine Hasse, Klaus Høyer, Brit Ross Winthereik and Ayo Wahlberg Eds., Handbook for the Anthropology of Technology, Palgrave
14.00-15.30
Room N102
Panel 078. In-between metrics and global environmental assessments: valuing environmental scientists and valuing environmental knowledge
Thies Dinkelberg, Anne Beaulieu and Selen Eren. Movebank: how knowledge infrastructures shape the values the of data, technologies, animals and researchers
Award for education on academic integrity
UG Comenius project “Privacy in Research” one of the top 10 best practice according to the Council of Europe (news item)
In the framework of the Comenius Project, we developed a role playing game about privacy and research data. It was implemented in the minor Data Wise and has been recognized as one of the best practices by the Council of Europe in early 2022. The Comenius Project is dedicated to developing a series of resources to develop research relevant ways to teach about privacy and data. More about the Comenius project can be found on our site: https://sites.google.com/rug.nl/privacy-in-research/home
Data and Society–Our book is out!
Published version available from Sage and authors’ accepted manuscript available from our university repositories (U. of Exeter and U. of Groningen).
Rediscovering the ‘local’ in knowledge infrastructures, PhD Scholarship, apply by 15-11-2021
Major societal challenges such as climate change, land degradation or loss of biodiversity have been formulated through large-scale and centralized systems for global data. But recent calls for disaggregation and localisation of data point to the need to produce, handle and use data differently. How can these calls for the local be reconciled with decades of scholarship that insists that data have always been local? Explore this topic as part of a PhD with the Knowledge Infrastructure dept Campus Fryslân – University of Groningen. Apply by 15 November. More details on site of U. of Groningen. #PhD #scholarship #STS
Anne Beaulieu 