Projects

The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts.

Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.

Each year, the Summer Academy will convene scholars from the US and Europe, including but not limited to specialists in ›German Media Theory‹, along with select doctoral students and exceptional undergraduates. As a collaboration between Stanford and Leuphana, the Academy is centered around an innovative and productive relationship between two different institutions: one where humanities disciplines intersect with the culture of Silicon Valley and another with historical and scholarly links to German Media Theory and its contemporary epistemological movements, notably with regard to digital cultures. The Summer Academy is an intensive five-day program with time devoted to rigorous discussion of collaborative, interlinking, as well as individual topics, joint readings, and one-on-one consultations among up to 20 student participants and a faculty of 5-8 renowned international scholars. Taking place on an annual basis, and alternating between Stanford and Germany, each year’s Summer Academy focuses on a different overarching topic, with morning and afternoon sessions curated by the current faculty members. A reader with texts and material based on participants’ projects will be compiled and distributed in advance. The Summer Academy is conducted in English.

Steering Committee

Stanford

Prof. Shane Denson, Film and Media Studies, Department of Art & Art History (shane.denson@stanford.edu)
Prof. Marisa Galvez, French and German Studies, Division of Literatures, (mgalvez@stanford.edu)

Leuphana

Prof. Timon Beyes, Sociology of Organization and Culture (timon.beyes@leuphana.de)
Prof. Claus Pias, History and Epistemology of Media (pias@leuphana.de)

Overview of present and past summer schools could be found here. 

Doing Digital Identities (ERC-Starting Grant)

DigID is an ERC-funded, five-year collaborative research project. It is concerned with the turn towards digital identification devices which are increasingly used and implemented by state institutions, private entities and international organisations in many countries around the world. This shift constitutes the most significant change in statist identification practices since the consolidation of the international passport regime in the 19th century. Digital ID devices like electronic ID cards providing access to government services via PINs, biometric databases, and blockchain-secured digital identity wallets are increasingly complementing, or even replacing, paper-based means of identification.

Yet so far, the implications of digital ID devices have mostly been studied in relation to criminal suspects and migrant ‘others’, not the normalized majority of citizens. This project uses this unique moment of change to assess how material citizenship—i.e., the technologies and infrastructures used to enact citizenship as a political subjectivity and a formal relation to the state—is reshaped in the digital age. Its principal research question is: How does the digitization of identification practices reconfigure relations between citizens and state authorities?

The project investigates transformations of citizen-state relations through digital ID devices at three sites: birth registration, citizen-government transactions, and border controls. Theoretically, the project draws on citizenship studies, science and technology (STS) and data studies to propose a conception of material citizenship as performative and sociotechnical and to advance a research agenda that focuses on the practical, epistemic, political, and ethical implications of digital identification. Methodologically, the project combines multi-sited ethnographies, textual analysis, and mapping to study the design, implementation, and use of digital ID devices in one international and five national case studies (see the brief descriptions below). In this way, DigID sheds light on the much-neglected material dimension of citizenship and shows how digital ID devices reshape the lived experience of citizenship—understood as a legal status, a form of membership in a political community, and a set of bottom-up practices for enacting social and political rights.

A team of five researchers (besides the PI, 2 Post-docs and 2 PhD-students) will engage with these questions through multi-sited, collaborative research in five national and one international case study. Each of the five country case studies is unique but is also indicative of larger developments, changes and transformations regarding the digitization of statist identification practices.

Estonia: The Baltic country is often cited as an example to follow in terms of digital identity and e-government. Today, two-thirds of Estonia’s citizens regularly use their eID-cards to access more than 2000 e-government services. Estonia’s government continually initiates new projects to refine and advance the country’s eID infrastructure to maintain Estonia's status as an unchallenged pioneer in terms of digital ID. Estonia’s unique e-residency program even makes a range of government services available to non-citizens. The Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) develops Estonia’s ‘X-road’ system into a cross-border e-government infrastructure with Finland and other EU member-states, which could evolve into a blueprint for a European Digtial ID Ecosystem.

Germany: As ‘Europe’s economic powerhouse’, Germany promotes EU standards for digital identities to realize the ‘digital single market’. Domestically, the government tries to increase – at times against the resistance of civil society actors – the use of e-government services, for instance through an app to make eID-card functions available on mobile devices. In its IDunion project, the Federal Printing Office develops blockchain-secured digital ID wallets in collaboration with 12 private entities. The federal police promotes, in turn, its EasyPass project as a European solution for automated border controls, while Germany's Chief Information Officer leads a program that aims to develop a ‘European ecosystem for digital identities’.

Indonesia: In Asia, Indonesia is an early adopter of digital ID devices, improving citizen-state transactions in a geographically complex environment. For instance, the country's Population and Civil Registration Agency already began to issue its citizens chip-equipped biometric eID-cards in 2011. To date, it continues to strive for full coverage of its eID-card system, which also plays a key role in ambitious plans to harmonize Indonesia’s fragmented ID program. Meanwhile, the National Team for Accelerated Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) runs pilot projects to improve access to vital social benefits in remote areas via digital ID devices, such as facial recognition and digital ID wallets.

Malawi: Led by the UNDP and support by the World Banks' ID4D initiative, the Malawian government managed to biometrically register 9 million people in the record time of 180 days in 2017 and to issue the same number of national ID-cards in 2018. Widely celebrated as a success story, the country's ambitious digital registration and identification system is supervised by the newly founded National Registration Bureau (NRB). Since its existence, a range of private actors and development agencies, such as banks, the NGO GiveDirectly or UNICEF run programs that build on the country new centralised civil registration system. Malawi’s Ministry of Home Affairs tries, in turn, to mobilise the new biometric ID cards for building a digital border management solution for the country.

Sierra Leone: The West-African country an important target country of the World Bank’s ID4D initiative. The country's National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) has implemented a national eID-card program that links multi-modal biometric data with a unique national identity number (NIN). It provides the foundation for the plans of the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation (DISTI) to integrate datasets from various government information systems, including voting, tax, social service registers. The rollout of the eID-card program is ongoing and the government aims to achieve a coverage rate of 90% by 2025. The eID-card program is also meant to provide citizens with freedom of movement as well as access to government services across the 15 member states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). In addition, through continued efforts by the NGO Plan International, the NCRA tries to increase birth registration rates in remote rural areas with the help of digital mobile devices.

More information on https://www.digitalidentities.eu/ 

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. It is assumed that smart systems in logistics, real estate, finance, energy, and retail will encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and will resolve problems of top-down economic planning.

In this project five particular aspects of this new model of wealth creation and urban management will be examined: optimization, sustainability, inclusion, resilience, and convenience. These are all particular varieties of the promise of wealth associated with smartness: the optimization and subsequent affordability provided by logistics; the sustainability required for living on a planet in crisis; the inclusion in economic life offered by decentralized finance; the energy resilience to climate change, resource limitations, and geopolitics promised by smart grids and financial hedging; and the convenience sold by smart retail.

It is smartness which propels these promises promoted by venture capital. Whether through public smart city initiatives or the plethora of private urban platforms for mobility, sustainability, finance and retail, venture capital is reshaping how wealth is produced and reproduced in the cities of today and tomorrow.

This project examines historically and ethnographically the relationship between contemporary smart urbanism and wealth, and the urban economies transformed through smart technologies.

More information on http://smartnesswealth.net/about/