Mads Dahl Gjefsen

Dr. Mads Dahl Gjefsen, a Visiting Researcher at the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) in the spring semester of 2026, is a Senior Researcher at Studio Apertura and NTNU Social Research (Norway). His academic background is in Science and Technology Studies, and his ongoing work also connects to related disciplines and fields, including organizational and transitions research.

Gjefsen has worked on topics such as energy, food, digitalization, and welfare. Across each of these, he studies promises of new forms of technology and rationalization together with the political-economic dynamics associated with promise-making, as published in research journals such as Energy Research & Social Science and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. He is increasingly interested in work that seeks to understand limits and alternatives to socio-political economic growth imperatives in different thematic areas. To that end, he co-founded the Norwegian Gemini Center for Post-Growth Futures in 2023 and secured funding from the Research Council of Norway that same year as Principal Investigator of the four-year project Limits to Digitalization: Exploring the Transition Challenges of Norwegian Data Centers (L2D, RCN award 344115), in partnership with IGS.

L2D studies the material underpinnings of digitalization in the form of data centers, especially as these are currently taking shape in Norway, where support for the data center industry has emerged as a national policy priority in recent years. L2D explores the potential for drawing on the principle of sufficiency (‘enoughness’) in the face of global digital expansion, and aims to propose ways to operationalize that principle based on multi-level studies at community, national, and global scales.

Over the course of spring 2026, Dr. Gjefsen will continue his collaboration with colleagues at IGS by finalizing publications from L2D and developing proposals for new collaborations in the years to come.