In a processual media thinking, the subproject investigates how participatory relations emerge from the communications of the smartphone, are thwarted, and communities are manufactured and dissolved. For this purpose, processes are investigated that become recognizable in the interface operations of the device and thus on displays. Furthermore, the dynamization of resistance is focused on in its (opening) and closing of spaces of participation. The project investigates the extent to which gender or gendering is produced, solidified or shifted from these relational structures of participation. In the sense of 'ecologies of practices' (Stengers), the subproject focuses in its investigations on the concrete, historical situations of positioning and restructuring of participation relations between human and technical actors and understands resistance as situationally produced or only temporarily fixable resistance or immunization. Events such as the emergence of the MeToo hashtag or anti-feminist movements on platforms of mobile media culture can be determined as political constellations, but they are to be opened up in their resistance dynamics and thus in their technological and media dimensions within the framework of the planned investigations. The project thus pursues the concern of tracing the medial process of the resistant restructuring of gender in specific socio-technical constellations of the smartphone with a discourse-analytical and praxeological approach.
Putting forth the argument that the concept of modern film has to be reconsidered as the result of transnational and cross-cultural entanglements of film practices and aesthetics, the research project aims to make a significant contribution to the „provincializing“ of European film theory and history from a postcolonial perspective (Chakrabarty 2000). Although interdisciplinary in its scope – bringing together theoretical and methodological considerations of media archeology, film studies, history of knowledge –, it takes up the perspective of a postcolonial approach to cinema studies, which is concerned with the ongoing movements and relations between West-Europe and the rest of the world (Chow 2012). Instead of discussing the transnational relations between West-European and Indian cinema in the first decades after independence (1947–1975) in terms of one-sided influence in either direction, it takes the films produced in India by West-European auteurs during this time of profound change as a starting point for the reconstruction of these mutual encounters. By looking at the aesthetic practices, the films themselves as well as the critical reception and theoretical debate in India and Western Europe the project aims to show that the emergence of the ‘new’ (new film aesthetics, new film theory) needs to be considered as effect of these entanglements. In result, cinematic modernism as well as its theorization is not only de-centered but comes into view as a cosmopolitan project.
My work operates at the intersection of critical computing, algorithm studies, and feminist technoscience. I am specifically interested in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning and how developments in these fields reconfigure notions of the body, subjectivity, knowledge, and social relations. My approach to these questions is informed by continental philosophy and materialist media theory, interaction design, and emerging feminist new materialist thought. All of these approaches converge in their insistence on the materiality of media and communication technologies and their crucial role in shaping ways of knowing and being. My current work is concerned with the forms of knowledge production in machine learning systems, also known as practical AI applications or data-based predictive algorithms. While calls to de-factualize machine learning systems often focus on the study of machine learning applications post-factually and a narrow, technical definition of "fairness" and "accountability," I am interested in the epistemic principles of how machine learning systems learn and produce knowledge. In my work, I explore how these principles relate to a broader nexus of gendered and racialized power relations and how they resonate with and diverge from established modes of scientific knowledge, and how they can be intervened from a feminist and post/decolonial epistemological and theoretical approach. The broader premise of my work is to contribute to critical feminist reimaginings of technologically mediated futures and to bring critical theories and technological practices to play a role in the development and implementation of such imaginaries.
The dissertation project addresses the intersection of cryptography, IT security, and gender, physicalities, immunology, and whether a queer concept of security can be conceived for IT security.
The dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, a history of the science of cryptography and IT security as fields of research is presented. For this purpose, Foucaultian discourse analysis, as well as positions and theories from gender studies, are used to problematize what IT security actually is, when and how IT security became an object of knowledge production, and which concept of security underlies it.
Starting with the ransomware wave of 2017 (#WannaCry) and the history of ransomware, as well as the emergence of the field of cryptovirology, the second part of the thesis focuses on the relationship between IT security and immunology, addressing the structural and personal intersections of the two fields that link IT security to the HIV/AIDS discourse of the 1980s. In the third part of the dissertation, a queer reading of backdoors as privileged figurations within the immunological-paranoid structured IT security discourse will be undertaken based on the previous findings, and a queer concept of security in the context of IT security will be tested. In conclusion, this will put up for discussion whether, given the structural workings of IT security, its entanglements, and deficits, there might not be entirely different ways of thinking about IT security and the way software and hardware are constructed.
In the network I would like to engage with a thinking of methods rooted in feminist philosophy of science methods rooted in feminist theory of science. This concerns equally the production and mediation of knowledge: its medial "formatting" (Linseisen). Fundamental to this is the concept of situatedness by Donna Haraway as well as Karen Barad's theory of the entanglement of being and knowing. I would like to think this further for interventionist, creative and cooperative processes of empirical research.
The subject of this metaperspective on method development are own projects, such as cycling media and feminist cycling collectives, which deal with media practices, activisms and practices of cycling. Guiding the projects considered are combined methodologies that combine feminist approaches with media analysis and participant observation. From a feminist STS perspective, I ask about the mediality of the methodologies in different contexts. Thus, I want to combine practices of knowledge production, mediation, and an activist knowledge into an "interference [...] of practices" (Deleuze: 358). I also ask how to do ethnography cooperatively and collectively online and offline, locally and delocally (Lowenhaupt Tsing). Using the keywords Decolonize Ethnography (Bejarano et al.) Decolonize Methodology (Smith), and Activist Research (Strega/Brown), I want to discuss methods that work with communities to produce knowledge for local contexts rather than researching about them.
Last but not least, I am interested in how we can produce a media knowledge of the media through artistic and media methods such as essay film, ethnographic films, and desktop documentaries, thus adopting an immanent, situated perspective. This follows on from my project Erfahrungsbilder, in which I described ethnographic film as a practice and method.
I am interested in relations – their modes, movements, and (im)materialities and I’m especially interested in their rethinking through incomputability. How we relate, to each other, to any thing, living, dead, material or not, any structure or system, the world, is determined by media and technology. Their history of ideas, of course, has always been intimately intertwined with thinking race (and colonialism), that is racial thinking. Pushing the boundaries of what counts as technology in the first place, and subsequently, where to find the lineages and linkages between media, technology and race is essential work in the studies of media and technology today.
In this project I am tracing the medial and technogenetic substances in the life work of Martinican poet, philosopher, and theorist Édouard Glissant to be able to understand the disruptive histories of race and technology that inform the organization of contemporary life. I am doing that by reading his work aligned to, against to, and leading up to cybernetic texts, concepts and imaginaries. His poetics and poetic knowledge, words at play, were a means to create new imaginaries. My reading takes me to three very different settings with very different objectives, namely information travelling during the Haitian revolution (communication and control), which is inspired and theoretically informed by Glissants seemingly unusual thinking about the Middle Passage, secondly, to an episode in which Glissant describes a project where a Japanese Computer Company invested in the study of African oral languages to develop a computer language (weaving/coding, creole), which brings me from the question of poetics and epistemology and developing a glossary suited for today’s digitized world to a reconfiguration of how to make sense of relating in precisely this world. We will need to relate, in order to organize, to be critical subjects, to collectivize, to solidarize, to resist, to narrate, to inscribe, and to write. This project is historical as much as it is current, it is conceptual as much as it is empirical, and it oscillates between disciplines.
What gender-coded notions of Jewishness are produced and negotiated in different media constellations? Véronique Sina addresses this fundamental question in her research project, which is located at the intersection of media studies, Visual Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies, Gender- and Queer Theory From the interdisciplinary perspective of Jewish Visual Culture Studies various contemporary stagings of Jewish cultural identities in (audio-)visual media will be examined. A particular focus will be placed on the complex connection between Jewishness and Queerness which found expression in the 19th century at the latest in the widespread notion of transgressive sexuality embodied by Jews. At the same time, it manifests itself in countless reproductions of anti-Semitic images of the body and gender, which are still widespread in the international media landscape today. This (historically far-reaching) gendering of Jewishness will be investigated in the context of a discourse-analytically oriented study of selected visual media, and it will be worked out how Jewishness is staged and problematized in media artifacts not only as otherness – in the sense of Jewish difference – but also as a form of norm-defying queerness.
In the context of the network, I would like to explore the extent to which concepts such as affect, diffraction, ecology can help to understand and design material, media-cultural/sociotechnical assemblages. All three concepts are less about the determination or analytical reflection of fixed, stable positions or structures, but rather about a speculative attention or mindfulnessattentiveness) for that which appears, occurs, or could appear or occur. They cannot be traced back to something that lies behind this appearance and from which it could be determined what can appear: rather, they are precarious manifestations of something that can be undetermined and, precisely for this reason, powerful and violent. In this respect, I am not interested in revealing structures, but rather in enabling other structures/processes, in finding models that are capable, for example, of making the entanglement of such different structures as climate, digitality, and coloniality conceivable without swallowing their respective specific differences. Following Deleuze/Guattari, Isabelle Stengers has brought the concept of divergence into play, which has also been taken up in the decolonial Latin American debate (e.g. by Blaser / de la Cadena) and related to the concept of the pluriverse (A World of Many Worlds). In the context of the research network, I would like to explore the importance that models of divergence, that is, models of enabling the coexistence of what diverges, could play in the framework of a theoretical/empirical attentiveness to phenomena of diffraction, to affective dynamics and ecologies that appear in the interstices of climate, digitality and coloniality.
A performative turn has been made in gender media studies that has connected the fluidity, processuality, and relationality of gender to the performativity of media. Under the concept of medial masculinities, we are interested in the co-constitution of gender, mediality, and technology with a view to the field of digital media and their specific cultures of affect.
In view of the currently increasingly observable claims as well as rejections of identity positions and politics, the question arises as to how these concepts can be made productive for a critique of social hierarchizations and exclusion mechanisms, especially under digital conditions. Using the strategic concept of medial masculinities, we foreground the co-constitution of gender, mediality, and technology as it occurs especially in contemporary self/documentary practices: It allows us to analyze specific digital media practices and materialities in their participation in the (re)production of identity concepts as well as their questioning. We are interested in analyzing masculinity with the help of the analytical category of gender and taking into account other categories of difference such as class and race, in order to get a look at the specific dynamics of gender differences and media, as they emerge, for example, in the diffuse media structures of a "manosphere". To examine these structures in terms of the extent to which they make possible or impossible modes of subjectivation and identity positions also means, on the one hand, to subject the concept of media masculinities itself in its functional setting to critical questioning and, on the other hand, to combine this with a revision and repoliticization of concepts of affect.
Thus, the observation of impossible identity positions already applies in a twofold sense: as a diffusion into anonymity on the one hand, and as a struggle for the recognition of subjectivizations that are always at stake on the other. In this sense, a critique of the question is urgent in which way digital-media structures document "sensations," in which way percepts and affects become differential medial power relations that gender and racialize.
Ausgehend von Theorien negativer Affektivität sowie von Ontologien der Enteignung interessiert mich, wie der Wissens- und Sinnabbruch, der durch rassistische Gewaltgeschichte und Traumatisierungen hervorgerufen wird, zugleich den prekären Ausgangspunkt eines reparativen Akts darstellt, der am Ort der Verletzung und Verwundung selbst operiert. In dieser Hinsicht möchte ich zeigen, wie in Zonen der Enteignung und Entrechtung sich widerspenstige Affizierungsverhältnisse behaupten können, aus denen Dynamiken und Sozialitäten hervorgehen, die die Produktion possessiver Identität, die Inbesitznahme der eigenen Affizier- und Verletzbarkeit, die Vervollständigung von autonomer Subjektivität oder die Fixierung von Zugehörigkeiten übersteigen. Am Ort der Gewalt, in der Enteignung entstehend und mit ihr vernäht, manifestieren diese widerspenstigen Sozialitäten keine identitätsstiftenden Solidaritäten, Positionen oder Standpunkte mehr. Als affektive Übergänge bleiben sie in der Zerbrochenheit, denn Enteignung wird nicht mehr in Aneignung, Verkennung nicht mehr in Anerkennung verwandelt, vielmehr eröffnen sie ein prekäres, kritisches und spekulatives Affekt-Wissen. In meinen Forschungsarbeiten verbinde ich poststrukturalistische Ansätze mit Queer, Postcolonial und Black Studies und frage: Wie kann eine derartige Politik der negativen Affekte im Kontext rassistischer Gewalt das Trauma auf sich nehmen und „weniger“ als Politik sowie „mehr“ als Sorge werden?
Social media' are always interwoven with economic, (state) political, cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, the socialities and publics that emerge can be understood as affective structures that create specific connections and exclude others or at least make them improbable. Following on from this, the project is concerned with the affective dimension of processes of platformization and related conceptual issues. One focus is on the evocation of 'feel good' content in the mutual platformizations of museums and social media (specifically: TikTok). In this context, I am interested in discursivities, infrastructures, aesthetics and practices of 'creativity' and 'knowledge' along 'feel good' lines: "dancing and having fun where we can. [...] experiencing the comfort and warmth that comes through simple human connection [...] caring for one another".[1] One thesis is that museums, or the museal, are as significant for the platformization of TikTok as, conversely, social media are significant for the platformization of the museal, with the emergent affect structures co-evolving with one another. On this basis, I am concerned with a Theorizing and methodologizing platformized affect structures.which understands them as multiple entanglements. Central questions here: How could 'diffractive ethnographies' be conceived and outlined? Could they function as a hinge between media studies methods and methods of empirical social research?
[1] https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/our-commitment-to-covid-19-relief-efforts/ (22.02.21).
What gender-coded notions of Jewishness are produced and negotiated in different media constellations? Véronique Sina addresses this fundamental question in her research project, which is located at the intersection of media studies, Visual Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies, Gender- and Queer Theory From the interdisciplinary perspective of Jewish Visual Culture Studies various contemporary stagings of Jewish cultural identities in (audio-)visual media will be examined. A particular focus will be placed on the complex connection between Jewishness and Queerness which found expression in the 19th century at the latest in the widespread notion of transgressive sexuality embodied by Jews. At the same time, it manifests itself in countless reproductions of anti-Semitic images of the body and gender, which are still widespread in the international media landscape today. This (historically far-reaching) gendering of Jewishness will be investigated in the context of a discourse-analytically oriented study of selected visual media, and it will be worked out how Jewishness is staged and problematized in media artifacts not only as otherness – in the sense of Jewish difference – but also as a form of norm-defying queerness.
A performative turn has been made in gender media studies that has connected the fluidity, processuality, and relationality of gender to the performativity of media. Under the concept of medial masculinities, we are interested in the co-constitution of gender, mediality, and technology with a view to the field of digital media and their specific cultures of affect.
In view of the currently increasingly observable claims as well as rejections of identity positions and politics, the question arises as to how these concepts can be made productive for a critique of social hierarchizations and exclusion mechanisms, especially under digital conditions. Using the strategic concept of medial masculinities, we foreground the co-constitution of gender, mediality, and technology as it occurs especially in contemporary self/documentary practices: It allows us to analyze specific digital media practices and materialities in their participation in the (re)production of identity concepts as well as their questioning. We are interested in analyzing masculinity with the help of the analytical category of gender and taking into account other categories of difference such as class and race, in order to get a look at the specific dynamics of gender differences and media, as they emerge, for example, in the diffuse media structures of a "manosphere". To examine these structures in terms of the extent to which they make possible or impossible modes of subjectivation and identity positions also means, on the one hand, to subject the concept of media masculinities itself in its functional setting to critical questioning and, on the other hand, to combine this with a revision and repoliticization of concepts of affect.
Thus, the observation of impossible identity positions already applies in a twofold sense: as a diffusion into anonymity on the one hand, and as a struggle for the recognition of subjectivizations that are always at stake on the other. In this sense, a critique of the question is urgent in which way digital-media structures document "sensations," in which way percepts and affects become differential medial power relations that gender and racialize.
The dissertation project addresses the intersection of cryptography, IT security, and gender, physicalities, immunology, and whether a queer concept of security can be conceived for IT security.
The dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, a history of the science of cryptography and IT security as fields of research is presented. For this purpose, Foucaultian discourse analysis, as well as positions and theories from gender studies, are used to problematize what IT security actually is, when and how IT security became an object of knowledge production, and which concept of security underlies it.
Starting with the ransomware wave of 2017 (#WannaCry) and the history of ransomware, as well as the emergence of the field of cryptovirology, the second part of the thesis focuses on the relationship between IT security and immunology, addressing the structural and personal intersections of the two fields that link IT security to the HIV/AIDS discourse of the 1980s. In the third part of the dissertation, a queer reading of backdoors as privileged figurations within the immunological-paranoid structured IT security discourse will be undertaken based on the previous findings, and a queer concept of security in the context of IT security will be tested. In conclusion, this will put up for discussion whether, given the structural workings of IT security, its entanglements, and deficits, there might not be entirely different ways of thinking about IT security and the way software and hardware are constructed.
In the network I would like to engage with a thinking of methods rooted in feminist philosophy of science methods rooted in feminist theory of science. This concerns equally the production and mediation of knowledge: its medial "formatting" (Linseisen). Fundamental to this is the concept of situatedness by Donna Haraway as well as Karen Barad's theory of the entanglement of being and knowing. I would like to think this further for interventionist, creative and cooperative processes of empirical research.
The subject of this metaperspective on method development are own projects, such as cycling media and feminist cycling collectives, which deal with media practices, activisms and practices of cycling. Guiding the projects considered are combined methodologies that combine feminist approaches with media analysis and participant observation. From a feminist STS perspective, I ask about the mediality of the methodologies in different contexts. Thus, I want to combine practices of knowledge production, mediation, and an activist knowledge into an "interference [...] of practices" (Deleuze: 358). I also ask how to do ethnography cooperatively and collectively online and offline, locally and delocally (Lowenhaupt Tsing). Using the keywords Decolonize Ethnography (Bejarano et al.) Decolonize Methodology (Smith), and Activist Research (Strega/Brown), I want to discuss methods that work with communities to produce knowledge for local contexts rather than researching about them.
Last but not least, I am interested in how we can produce a media knowledge of the media through artistic and media methods such as essay film, ethnographic films, and desktop documentaries, thus adopting an immanent, situated perspective. This follows on from my project Erfahrungsbilder, in which I described ethnographic film as a practice and method.
I am interested in relations – their modes, movements, and (im)materialities and I’m especially interested in their rethinking through incomputability. How we relate, to each other, to any thing, living, dead, material or not, any structure or system, the world, is determined by media and technology. Their history of ideas, of course, has always been intimately intertwined with thinking race (and colonialism), that is racial thinking. Pushing the boundaries of what counts as technology in the first place, and subsequently, where to find the lineages and linkages between media, technology and race is essential work in the studies of media and technology today.
In this project I am tracing the medial and technogenetic substances in the life work of Martinican poet, philosopher, and theorist Édouard Glissant to be able to understand the disruptive histories of race and technology that inform the organization of contemporary life. I am doing that by reading his work aligned to, against to, and leading up to cybernetic texts, concepts and imaginaries. His poetics and poetic knowledge, words at play, were a means to create new imaginaries. My reading takes me to three very different settings with very different objectives, namely information travelling during the Haitian revolution (communication and control), which is inspired and theoretically informed by Glissants seemingly unusual thinking about the Middle Passage, secondly, to an episode in which Glissant describes a project where a Japanese Computer Company invested in the study of African oral languages to develop a computer language (weaving/coding, creole), which brings me from the question of poetics and epistemology and developing a glossary suited for today’s digitized world to a reconfiguration of how to make sense of relating in precisely this world. We will need to relate, in order to organize, to be critical subjects, to collectivize, to solidarize, to resist, to narrate, to inscribe, and to write. This project is historical as much as it is current, it is conceptual as much as it is empirical, and it oscillates between disciplines.
What gender-coded notions of Jewishness are produced and negotiated in different media constellations? Véronique Sina addresses this fundamental question in her research project, which is located at the intersection of media studies, Visual Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies, Gender- and Queer Theory From the interdisciplinary perspective of Jewish Visual Culture Studies various contemporary stagings of Jewish cultural identities in (audio-)visual media will be examined. A particular focus will be placed on the complex connection between Jewishness and Queerness which found expression in the 19th century at the latest in the widespread notion of transgressive sexuality embodied by Jews. At the same time, it manifests itself in countless reproductions of anti-Semitic images of the body and gender, which are still widespread in the international media landscape today. This (historically far-reaching) gendering of Jewishness will be investigated in the context of a discourse-analytically oriented study of selected visual media, and it will be worked out how Jewishness is staged and problematized in media artifacts not only as otherness – in the sense of Jewish difference – but also as a form of norm-defying queerness.
In the context of the network, I would like to explore the extent to which concepts such as affect, diffraction, ecology can help to understand and design material, media-cultural/sociotechnical assemblages. All three concepts are less about the determination or analytical reflection of fixed, stable positions or structures, but rather about a speculative attention or mindfulnessattentiveness) for that which appears, occurs, or could appear or occur. They cannot be traced back to something that lies behind this appearance and from which it could be determined what can appear: rather, they are precarious manifestations of something that can be undetermined and, precisely for this reason, powerful and violent. In this respect, I am not interested in revealing structures, but rather in enabling other structures/processes, in finding models that are capable, for example, of making the entanglement of such different structures as climate, digitality, and coloniality conceivable without swallowing their respective specific differences. Following Deleuze/Guattari, Isabelle Stengers has brought the concept of divergence into play, which has also been taken up in the decolonial Latin American debate (e.g. by Blaser / de la Cadena) and related to the concept of the pluriverse (A World of Many Worlds). In the context of the research network, I would like to explore the importance that models of divergence, that is, models of enabling the coexistence of what diverges, could play in the framework of a theoretical/empirical attentiveness to phenomena of diffraction, to affective dynamics and ecologies that appear in the interstices of climate, digitality and coloniality.
A performative turn has been made in gender media studies that has connected the fluidity, processuality, and relationality of gender to the performativity of media. Under the concept of medial masculinities, we are interested in the co-constitution of gender, mediality, and technology with a view to the field of digital media and their specific cultures of affect.
In view of the currently increasingly observable claims as well as rejections of identity positions and politics, the question arises as to how these concepts can be made productive for a critique of social hierarchizations and exclusion mechanisms, especially under digital conditions. Using the strategic concept of medial masculinities, we foreground the co-constitution of gender, mediality, and technology as it occurs especially in contemporary self/documentary practices: It allows us to analyze specific digital media practices and materialities in their participation in the (re)production of identity concepts as well as their questioning. We are interested in analyzing masculinity with the help of the analytical category of gender and taking into account other categories of difference such as class and race, in order to get a look at the specific dynamics of gender differences and media, as they emerge, for example, in the diffuse media structures of a "manosphere". To examine these structures in terms of the extent to which they make possible or impossible modes of subjectivation and identity positions also means, on the one hand, to subject the concept of media masculinities itself in its functional setting to critical questioning and, on the other hand, to combine this with a revision and repoliticization of concepts of affect.
Thus, the observation of impossible identity positions already applies in a twofold sense: as a diffusion into anonymity on the one hand, and as a struggle for the recognition of subjectivizations that are always at stake on the other. In this sense, a critique of the question is urgent in which way digital-media structures document "sensations," in which way percepts and affects become differential medial power relations that gender and racialize.
Social media' are always interwoven with economic, (state) political, cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, the socialities and publics that emerge can be understood as affective structures that create specific connections and exclude others or at least make them improbable. Following on from this, the project is concerned with the affective dimension of processes of platformization and related conceptual issues. One focus is on the evocation of 'feel good' content in the mutual platformizations of museums and social media (specifically: TikTok). In this context, I am interested in discursivities, infrastructures, aesthetics and practices of 'creativity' and 'knowledge' along 'feel good' lines: "dancing and having fun where we can. [...] experiencing the comfort and warmth that comes through simple human connection [...] caring for one another".[1] One thesis is that museums, or the museal, are as significant for the platformization of TikTok as, conversely, social media are significant for the platformization of the museal, with the emergent affect structures co-evolving with one another. On this basis, I am concerned with a Theorizing and methodologizing platformized affect structures.which understands them as multiple entanglements. Central questions here: How could 'diffractive ethnographies' be conceived and outlined? Could they function as a hinge between media studies methods and methods of empirical social research?
[1] https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/our-commitment-to-covid-19-relief-efforts/ (22.02.21).