Maria Udén

About me

My name is Maria Udén and I am a professor of gender and technology. The long-term work I started as a doctoral student is about combining feminist science and engineering. In 1988, I graduated as a mining engineer at LTU and in 2000 I defended my interdisciplinary doctoral thesis in work science. It is called Technically Speaking by Women. My research, teaching and innovation actions tend to be positioned at the interface between technical innovation and social movements aiming for equality between women and men. Sometimes the emphasis leans more one way, sometimes the other.

Current project: GENGREEN

GENGREEN-Closing the Small-Business and Gender Gap through education for sustainable and competitive growth takes place January 2024 to December 2026. The initiator of the project, which is co-financed by EU Interreg Aurora, is the Finnish Ruralia Institute. The main goal is to develop a program for green entrepreneurship education. Special focus is placed on women, being the underrepresented gender in entrepreneurship. The program concept is based on Living Labs, online platforms, and cross-border cooperation.

The next GENGREEN activity in Norrbotten takes place in Luleå on May 27–28, 2026. The host is the Design research subject at Luleå University of Technology and the theme is Green Creative Entrepreneurship and Design. Participants will get to try digital and "physical" design methods, listen to lectures, network with like-minded guests from Norway and Finland, and take part in a workshop on the theme The journey is the goal – Find your green path.

Target group: You who are an entrepreneur/business owner or considering taking that path, you who have artistic or craft activities "on the side" of your regular job or studies, or as part of your life as retired, and last but not least, you who are a student belong to our target group. Welcome! Read the full invitation here pdf.. Questions and registration: Send an email to maria.uden@ltu.se or call 0920-493023 (Note! SMS does not work on this number.)

Current project: Innovation, gender, and sustainable development - follow-up on the conditions for teaching.

The distance course Innovation, Gender, and Sustainable Development has been part of Luleå University of Technology's range of independent courses since 2010. The course is at the undergraduate level, comprises 7.5 ECTS credits, and is offered at quarter-time once per academic year. For many years, the first assignment, also the first examination task, has included searching the Internet for definitions of “sustainable development” and “innovation.” A current study investigates whether, and if so how, the selection of definitions has changed over the years from 2016 through 2024. The purpose is to create an understanding of the conditions for teaching the course’s theme. You can find more about the project here.

Completed project: Anthology with Intergender

Two research subjects at Luleå University of Technology; Human Work Science and Design, are part of InterGender – International Consortium for Interdisciplinary Feminist Research Training, which is coordinated by Linköping University. One contribution has been co-editorship in the anthology Voices from Gender Studies, which was published in 2024 in the series Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality.

Full reference: Just, E., Udén, M., Weetzel, V., & Åsberg, C. (Eds.). (2024). Voices from Gender Studies: Negotiating the Terms of Academic Production, Epistemology, and the Logics and Contents of Identity. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003358794

Completed project: Reindeer Resource

Resource pool for entrepreneurship in the reindeer industry with associated indsutries: Quality in slaughter and cutting runs from April 2020 to September 2022 and is financed by the EU Interreg Nord, the parties themselves and, Region Norrbotten provides the Swedish national co-financing. Personnel supply is a bottleneck in reindeer slaughter and cutting, which in turn affects the development potential in local processing of food products, arts and crafts, catering, and more. This project produced a course package for reindeer slaughter and cutting, for folks who want to qualify for joining a high-quality resource pool.

Collaboration projects on IT for reindeer husbandry

Originating from the Vinnova-funded Sámi Network Connectivity (SNC), a series of projects followed from the early 2000s to the 2020s, focused on innovation in IT for the needs of reindeer husbandry. SNC was initially a proposal in the form of a so-called "architecture" for a communication system. The aim was to develop Internet-compatible network technology based on Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) as well as portable transmitters and receivers. The largest project in the series was N4C - Networking for Communications Challenged Communities, which was funded by the then EU FP-7 program, New paradigms and experimental facilities, and was coordinated by Luleå University of Technology. One of the later projects coordinated by LTU was Vinnova-funded Issäkerhet för rennäringen where a solution was developed, that used drones for assessment of ice safety for reindeer herders' operational needs. Since the years around 2020, the projects the research subject Design has been involved in have primarily been owned by the actors in reindeer husbandry themselves. Thanks to the involvement of LTU's honorary doctor Vint Cerf, Google has also supported the collaboration. Taking the role as a mentor from the very start Dr. Cerf has profoundly contributed to the success of the collaboration. The most concrete result for the reindeer husbandry sector today, is a network primarly focused on reindeer tracking, which is run by the Dálvvadis economic association. 

Previous projects connected to the women's movement and gender equality initiatives.

Under the leadership of Paula Wennberg, several projects on the theme of gender mainstreaming in the IT industry have been carried out by the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology at LTU. I participated in, among others, GENOVATE, an action project for gender mainstreaming at seven European universities, and Gender Smart Arena, which was a collaboration with small and medium-sized enterprises in the IT industry as well as authorities in Norrbotten and Västerbotten. Gender Smart Arena resulted, among other things, in Richer Business, a practical tool with ideas for better business through gender equality. The tool is free to use and can be found at the site richerbusiness.eu.

Several projects have had a direct connection to the women's movement. One example is a thread focusing on women and natural resources in the Arctic. During the first half of the 2000s, I was involved in two initiatives run by the Women’s University North in Steigen, Norway:

• Women's participation in decision-making processes in Arctic fisheries resource
• Women and natural resource management in the rural North

Another example is Lyftet, a collaboration with Mälardalen University where Malin Lindberg and Lina Stenmark were doctoral students. Lyftet was based on experiences from women-run businesses, networks, resource centers, associations, cooperatives, and village development groups in Norrbotten, Västerbotten, Västmanland, and Södermanland.