Dr.ir. L. (Lavinia) Marin

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Lavinia Marin is an assistant professor in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section, TU Delft, the Netherlands. Her current research investigates the conditions of possibility for enabling epistemic agency (both at the individual and group level) for users of social networking platforms. Given that users already have epistemic agency and capacities, what does it take in terms of design to foster these capacities? Lavinia investigates the problem of epistemic agency for online users from several complementary perspectives: what are the emerging epistemic norms in online communities, how the epistemic norms of online life are intertwined with moral and social norms, and the ways in which users can sharpen their epistemic skills through using features of the environment (scaffolds and affordances),  informationally overloaded environments, and the emotional infrastructure of the online social environments. She uses the frameworks of social epistemology, 4E cognition, and value sensitive design to answer these questions. Lavinia is pursuing this line of research as part of the ESDIT project and at the Delft Digital Ethics Centre. 

The second line of research concerns educational development in ethics education for engineering programmes. This line focuses on refining the learning goals for engineering ethics education, and developing methods tailored to these goals, particularly moral reflection and moral sensitivity. Together with colleagues from the Comet project, she is currently building a framework toward theorising the experiential approach in ethics education, namely why experiences with material objects, embodied exercises and performing scenarios are important for getting a more involved approach to ethical experiences.

Research interests: digital epistemology, social epistemology, epistemology of embodied cognition and reasoning, critical thinking as embodied and mediated practice, intellectual virtues, online (mis)information, critical inquiry in online communities, online emotions, digital forms of life, digital citizenship