Short abstract

This presentation shares early insights from a PhD project examining how ethics is negotiated and embedded in the development of InSilico Health solutions. It explores how interdisciplinary actors integrate ethical reflection into research, decision-making, and innovation practices.

Long abstract

The rise of InSilico Health (ISH) technologies, particularly Virtual Human Twins (VHT), signals a potential shift in biomedical research and healthcare innovation (Marques et al., 2024). By simulating biological processes, these technologies aim to advance precision medicine and improve clinical trials, although their effectiveness remains uncertain to date (Leo et al., 2022; Pappalardo et al., 2019; Rousseau et al., 2024; Samei, 2025). Alongside these developments, ethical frameworks such as Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI), Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and Technology Assessment (TA) seek to guide their responsible development and use, yet their integration into daily innovation practices and their influence on decision-making and technology development remains unclear (Elhadj et al., 2024; de Jong, 2025).

This presentation draws on early insights from an ongoing PhD project that uses an empirical ethics approach to examine how ethics is positioned, negotiated, and operationalized among interdisciplinary human and non-human actors in the development of InSilico solutions for medical research and healthcare. Rather than treating ethics as an external or merely formal requirement, this study approaches ethics as an active and dynamic component of research practice, one that is negotiated, contextually shaped, and influenced by broader social, institutional and power dynamics, while also shaping decision-making and the development of ISH technologies.

The presentation outlines the project’s central research questions and conceptual framework and invites discussion on the role of ethics, the allocation of responsibilities, and the practices through which ethical reflection is embedded in interdisciplinary research.

Short abstract

This paper presents findings from the BRIDGE project, which developed a participatory, scenario-based game to support ethical deliberation on digitalisation in higher education. Pilot testing shows how structured play can enable stakeholder engagement and collective reflection on ethical dilemmas.

Long abstract

Universities are undergoing rapid digital transformation as artificial intelligence, digital learning environments, and data infrastructures increasingly shape teaching, assessment, and governance. Yet institutional responses often remain fragmented or top-down, with limited opportunities for staff and students to collectively deliberate on the ethical implications of these technologies. This paper presents findings from the BRIDGE project (Building Responsible and Inclusive Digitalisation through Game-based Engagement), funded by the Horizon Europe REINFORCING programme, which develops a participatory ethics game to support more inclusive and reflexive approaches to responsible digitalisation in higher education.

Drawing on participatory action research and Social Lab methodologies, the project co-developed a low-tech, scenario-based game designed to facilitate ethical deliberation among diverse stakeholders. Participants engage with real-world digitalisation dilemmas and collectively negotiate institutional responses from different ethical perspectives, creating a space for embedded ethical reflection within organisational decision-making.

We report findings from a series of pilot workshops involving academics, students, professional services staff, and external stakeholders. These pilots generated insights into how structured gameplay can surface value tensions, encourage perspective-taking, and open discussion of governance choices that are often treated as purely technical decisions. The results informed the refinement of the game mechanics and the development of a stakeholder engagement framework.

The paper argues that game-based participatory methods can function as practical tools for anticipatory governance, enabling organisations to explore ethical implications of digital technologies before policies are formalised. In doing so, the study contributes to STS debates on responsible innovation, participatory governance, and the integration of ethics into technoscientific practice.

Short abstract

Collaborative Art-Science Installations are interactive platforms build around a particular theme, functioning as catalysts for ethical reflexivity and stakeholder engagement. They served as a tool for embedding ethics within STAGE, a technoscience multidisciplinary research consortium.

Long abstract

The STAGE consortium is a six-year European research project exploring how to stay healthy as we age. This large-scale research collaboration involves 22 partners from 11 countries. There are ten work packages (WPs), which differ significantly from one another. Some conduct research on environmental aspects, ethics, exposome, multimorbidity and biomarkers, while others develop an AI model, digital tools and a data portal, neighbourhood atlas, among other outputs.

STAGE implements an Embedding Ethics and Social Sciences (EESS) strategy to address the complex and multidisciplinary aspects of research and interventions. Group workshops are organised to reflect on the ethical aspects of the research process and outputs, and meetings are held with the WP coordinators to propose action points, such as mitigation proposals if an ethical challenge is identified. Other focal strategies are implemented according to WP focus.

As the ethics WP identified ageism as an important ethical issue in the field of ageing, we started considering how to engage researchers with this concept beyond merely discussing it. Working alongside the WP responsible for communication, we agreed that an interactive approach that could produce visual evidence of the ethical aspects of ageism would be more impactful. To this end, we developed our first Collaborative Art-Science Installations (CASIs) on the topic of ageism. Seeing how powerful the CASI tool was, we started developing it further and applying it to more topics. This proposal aims to share CASIs as EESS tools by focusing on our experience of ageism.

Short abstract

I investigate how specific tools and interventions empower developers to ethical reframe the design problem, systematically analyse it from a techno-ethical perspective and assess potential implications of their research to integrate ethics deeply into technology research and development practices.

Long abstract

In this contribution I investigate how integrating ethics deeply into technology research and development can help developers overcome a major obstacle in the ethical alignment of innovation processes, namely, the “principles-to-practice gap”. By reference to a specific ethics intervention made by our Ethics Lab featuring an AI system under development, I show that the gap is not about a failure to operationalize principles for research and development practice, but rather that it originates in divergent styles of thinking: ethical reflection and design thinking. Based on these insights, I elucidate how ethical reflection can be integrated on a foundational level into research and development practices. An essential starting point is the creation of a space for reflection to explore potential designs, a space dedicated to contextualizing and re-conceptualizing technology. Drawing on an example, I will show how specific ethics interventions in combination with ethics tools allow to foster ethical reflexivity and stakeholder engagement, thus integrating ethics in applied research settings without the necessity of an ethicist being embedded in the research team throughout the entire process. The interventionist setup empowers the developers to critically reflect their own research by an ethical reframing of the design problem, a systematic ethical analysis, and an assessment of potential implications. I conclude by presenting the ways in which this approach of deep ethics integration challenges other approaches to integrating ethics at an early stage (such as embedded ethics, STIR, VCIO, ethics by design, VSD) and demonstrating what additional benefits it has to offer.

Short abstract

Efforts to embed ethics in health data governance led to the development of standardized tools for ethical assessment. We examine how these tools promise consistency and scalability, but also reshape ethical practice, shifting responsibility, privileging certain expertise, and quantifying values.

Long abstract

This contribution examines increasing efforts to “embed” ethics by integrating standardized tools and frameworks into ethical assessment procedures that intend to make such programs more “actionable” or “operationalizable” in everyday governance. We examine such efforts in the context of emerging infrastructures for secondary use of health data, such as the European Health Data Space (EHDS), which require an increasing number of legal and ethical review of data access requests.

Building on our recent scoping review of tools designed to operationalize ethical evaluation of data access (Jacquemin et al. submitted 2026), we analyze how ethical principles are translated into structured questionnaires, scoring systems, risk matrices, and decision aids. We critically examine these instruments’ promises of consistency, transparency, and scalability, and we pay particular attention to narratives of scale and “automation” of ethical review by embedding normative judgments into algorithms and workflows.

Relating the ethics tool literature with our current work in a European consortium on health data sharing, we evaluate how these tools reshape how ethics is practiced: often shifting responsibility toward data applicants; privileging certain forms of expertise and participation; and making some values more readily measurable, and thus actionable, than others. Tools also often structure ethical reflection without resolving normative trade-offs, leaving final decisions to ethics committees. We are specifically interested in the mobilization of quantification necessary to scale ethical assessment and reflect on the way that discourses on scale in ethics assessment bear upon important calls for embedding “situated ethics,” “ethics as process,” or “ethics in practice”.

Short abstract

This paper examines movement and mobility in embedded ethics work. As embedded STS researcher in a European research consortium, I analyse moving practices that enact embeddedness and show how movement co-produce the methodological and institutional conditions in which embedded ethics operates.

Long abstract

In Europe, many STS scholars are embedded in large technoscientific projects with a mandate to integrate ethical and societal dimensions into research practices. In doing so, they often move between actors across countries, disciplines, publics and imagined futures in order to foster ethical reflexivity and societal engagement with technology development. Several approaches and frameworks have focused on working with technical experts in their everyday research practices and expanding their capacity to integrate ethical considerations from within. A growing scholarship has expanded these frameworks across diverse technological domains and empirical settings. Moreover embedded ethics scholars have also reflected on their roles, methodological choices, limits and challenges involved in doing embedded ethics work. However, less attention has been paid to how embedded scholars move within and across the institutional and infrastructural arrangements (international research consortia) through which ethics is integrated into technoscientific practice and how these structures co-produce (im)mobility of the scholars themselves and the actors they seek to engage. Embeddedness is often enacted through the movement of people and many embedded ethics approaches often rely on particular forms of mobility, yet movement is generally assumed to be feasible or a logistical concern. Drawing on my involvement as a non-EU STS researcher in a European cancer research consortium, I examine my movements and problematise moving practices in integrating ethics in technoscientific projects and show how embeddedness is enacted through movement of actors. I argue for critical attention to how movement co-produces the material and institutional conditions that make embedded ethics work possible.

Short abstract

We present “ethics residencies” as a new approach to integrating bioethical inquiry into everyday scientific practices. Using Bioethics-in-Proteomics (BiP) as a case study, we discuss the methodology, as well as its results and challenges for exploring ethics in protein-oriented research.

Long abstract

We present Bioethics-in-Proteomics (BiP) as a case study for a new approach to integrating bioethical inquiry into everyday scientific practices.

Protein research has long been part of biological, biomedical, and clinical research. Nonetheless, protein and proteomics research have garnered little attention from bioethics. The BiP study explores the ethical dimensions of protein-oriented research practices. It has two aims: (1) addressing the research gap on the ethics of proteomics, and (2) piloting a methodology for weaving ethical inquiry into protein-oriented research practices.

BiP follows a residency-based, mixed-methods approach inspired by methods in science and technology studies. I, a bioethics researcher with a life sciences background, completed two 7- to 9-week “ethics residencies” in three different protein-oriented research groups (mass spectrometry, bioinformatics, and biochemistry). I combined participant observation, a ‘provenance workshop’, and a qualitative diary study to support the co-creative exploration of ethical dimensions in proteomics/protein research. Participating researchers are prompted to look at their own practices in new ways. ‘Provenance maps’ made visible how protein research workflows are deeply connected to the world through the research materials and tools used. ‘Reflection diaries’ allowed researchers to reflect on materials and practices in their day-to-day work.

I will present how this methodology made it possible to co-creatively identify ethical dimensions relating to e.g., the scientific and data labor supporting protein databases, and uncertainty of results in protein analysis. At the same time, I will describe how I experienced challenges related to shifting positions of dependency and power, spatial discomfort, and translating between disciplines.

Short abstract

This contribution shows the role of infrastructural agency in producing (in)justice of energy initiatives in the municipality of Arnhem. Based on analyses of three material arrangements, we argue that embedding ethics requires attending to how infrastructure participates in shaping (in)justice.

Long abstract

This paper argues that justice considerations cannot be separated from the sociotechnical systems within which they emerge. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), we conceptualise justice not as an external framework applied to technological development but as something that is produced by infrastructures, institutional arrangements, and the interactions between these. We develop this argument through the empirical study of energy infrastructure initiatives in the Dutch municipality of Arnhem related to electricity grid congestion, energy infrastructure investment, and roll-out of district heating grids. Our analysis of these initiative illustrates how different actors are able – or unable – to “speak out” about the desirability of these initiatives within the sociotechnical arrangements that shape local energy transitions.

This study illustrates that in the current discourse on energy justice the agency of technical systems is disregarded. The technological qualities of the system are seen as passive non-negotiables, while we observe that these qualities impose roles, responsibilities, restrictions, and inequalities upon those enrolled in the actor network. By foregrounding the agency of infrastructural systems, we highlight how ethical and justice-related outcomes are configured through sociotechnical arrangements. Approaches seeking to embed ethics in energy transitions must therefore move beyond treating ethical considerations as external evaluative criteria and instead attend to how infrastructures participate in shaping possibilities for just transitions.

Short abstract

We will derive a concrete plan for establishing a network that fosters collaboration, methodological exchange, and mutual support beyond EASST 2026.

Long abstract

In this open format session we will think together about how to sustain dialogue and cooperation among scholars and practitioners working on embedded and integrative ethics. The goal is to explore possibilities and derive a concrete plan for establishing a network that fosters collaboration, methodological exchange, and mutual support beyond EASST 2026.