The aim of this project is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe – how it is defined, analyzed, and deployed – and anti-catastrophic practices in an attempt to envision alternatives to our present. It does so through an edited volume, art and design commissions, and offline and online exhibitions that explore catastrophe and anti-catastrophe in practice around the globe.

Governing through Design is a collaborative research project that investigates how design impacts society. We use history and ethnography to develop new narratives of how the practices and epistemologies of design reconceive global politics and everyday lifeworlds, and invest in pedagogies that seek to intervene in contemporary practices of design.

This project interrogates how the emergence of “smart borders” transforms possibilities of movement and articulations of identity, citizenship, belonging, and exclusion and tracks the histories of situating borders as smart or intelligent through the use of media technologies. Located at the intersections of digital media studies, critical migration and border studies and political anthropology this multi-sited, multi-modal study draws on original interview materials with software engineers, policymakers, and migrant networks and uses discourse and archival analysis to critically examine how borders are framed as intelligent.

This project conducted by Dr. Michelle Pfeifer analyzes the sexual and gendered politics of migration data. The project interrogates how the production and circulation of numbers in refugee quotas, allocation keys, and migration statistics are central for bordering practices and are rooted in eugenicist and colonial genealogies of population control that situate migrants as a racialized threat of biological and social contagion.

This doctoral research offers a critical investigation of the ways in which the politics, epistemologies, and underlying assumptions that have shaped environmental design practices in the 1970s reverberate in contemporary design responses to the climate crisis.

In this project I explore his theoretical, poetic and political work through a lens of Black Studies and Media Theory at the same time to engage in questions of media and constructions of technology, histories and epistemologies.

The dissertation project analyses land reclamation projects in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands and develops a performative reading of design based on sand’s granular physics.

The dissertation project analyzes how refugee camps and humanitarian sites in general have become terrain for tech capital to implement extractive and experimental regimes as economies of exclusion.

Dieses Projekt durchgeführt von Nelly Y. Pinkrah und Michelle Pfeifer möchte sich in Anlehnung an das Konzept der «Critical Pedagogy» der Universität als Ort, an dem gemeinsam und kritisch gedacht sowie geforscht und Wissen produziert wird, widmen. Dazu möchten wir einen der wichtigsten Räume an der Universität, den Lehrraum, ernst nehmen und ihn – auch gemeinsam mit Studierenden – bewusst denken.

Digital transformation initiatives such as the European Health Data Space aim to help citizens take control of their health data, while making this data more available for research, policy, and innovation. This project addresses how digital design can improve citizens’ data privacy literacy through a consent interface optimized for comprehension.

Emerging innovations in the healthcare domains bring about increasingly networked forms of care. From a security standpoint, this makes our healthcare systems more vulnerable to various threats. This project, led by Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern as principal investigator and Chiara Carboni as postdoctoral fellow, brings together academic and industry parties to rethink cybersecurity regulation and practice, all the while maintaining critical perspectives on dynamics of securitization and their implications for access to and delivery of care.

Smartness promises wealth to cities around the world. Across the planet we see a growing investment by corporations, philanthropies, start-ups, and governments in computational infrastructures that will manage cities and their inhabitants. This ‘smartness’ is closely affiliated with venture capital and start-up experiments. This project examines historically and ethnographically the relationship between contemporary smart urbanism, wealth, and transformations in venture capital engendered through ‘smart’ discourses.

This project will examine a genealogy of ideas concerning decision making, technology, freedom, and evolution in post 1970’s economics, the human and life sciences, and finance. Heuristically borrowing from the motto of the French and Haitian States, I intend to trace the reformulation of categories fundamental to liberalism and liberal economic thinking through technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Planetary Experiments(PlanEx) investigates the changing relationship between knowledge production and collective social life in the Anthropocene. From geo-engineering to synthetic biology, the accelerated digitization and networking of research practices is allowing the entire planet to become a tool that can be used for the purpose of measurement and observation. In turn, planetary phenomena and processes – from food security to the climate crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic – have become the subject of experimental research and mass testing.

Emerging research on vocal biomarkers attempts revolutionize diagnostics processes in neuropsychiatry drawing on machine learning techniques. This project traces the ingression of computational methodologies in neuropsychiatric diagnostics, and specifically the emergence of voices as diagnostic tools. It asks which new links between voice, biology and identity are being enabled through computational techniques, and how earlier histories of and reflection on minoritarian voices might enable us to unsettle them.

This doctoral research project investigates how cultural narratives and digital technologies shape representations of women in old age. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining this co-constitutive relationship between aging and technology, drawing from a selection of science fiction texts and science and technology case studies.