In March 2023, Kristin Asdal gave a lecture "On the little tools and social epistemology of democracy" at Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna, where she was invited as a guest professor for the month of March 2023. In the lecture she presented her ongoing research on democracy and politics, where these abstract notions are taken to be a material and oftentimes technical affair. Fundamentally, Asdal is concerned with teasing out and analyzing the so-called "little tools of democracy" through a series of studies on controversies around politics of nature, drawing from key approaches in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS).
This work on the materiality and little tools of politics continues in the Value threads project, for example in examining how processes that can be describes as forms of financialization should not only be understood "ideologically" but also through material political work through for example documents.