Affiliated Projects

The affiliated projects section gathers the doctoral research conducted by PhD students in the context of the Centre for Digital Cultures. These projects extend and deepen the Centre's core research themes through focused studies that contribute original theoretical insights and empirical findings to the field of digital cultures.

This dissertation examines how distributed forms of anti-war mobilization in Russia, emerging in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, transform into a mode of collective agency termed survival organizing. Grounded in the case of the Russian anti-war ecology, the research investigates how diverse and self-organized actions initially emerged without central coordination, often in exile or under conditions of extreme repression. These actions were marked by a rejection of traditional hierarchies and the legacy of the liberal opposition, instead embracing principles of horizontality, autonomy, care, and ethical responsibility.

The work traces how these distributed initiatives, ranging from mutual aid networks and digital solidarity campaigns to care work and feminist anti-war interventions - form a dense and dynamic field of resistance. What connects them is not a shared ideology or centralized leadership, but a shared commitment to acting in the present while prefiguring alternative futures. These practices are often fragile, small-scale, and embedded in everyday life, yet they hold transformative potential precisely because they build infrastructures of support and relational continuity in times of collapse.

Through this lens, the dissertation develops the concept of survival organizing - a mode of collective action that moves beyond reactive survival to become a proactive, world-building strategy. It is “survival with a plus sign”: a form of organizing that sustains life and enables political subjectivation under conditions of profound precarity. Survival organizing draws on the logic of autopoiesis, not only maintaining existing structures but generating new forms of relationality and resistance that are open-ended, non-linear, and often anonymous. Importantly, this form of agency is decentered; it is not located in individual actors or organizations but embedded in practices, relations, and infrastructures that can be taken up and actualized by others, even those yet to come.

By focusing on the distributed, prefigurative, and ethical dimensions of anti-war organizing, this dissertation offers a rethinking of collective action under authoritarianism and sociatal inertia. 

Machine learning (ML) is a key area of artificial intelligence (AI) research which receives respective investment and attention but which also reignites familiar debates about the societal impact of AI. In light of issues arising with ML-based technologies – such as algorithmic discrimination  – many demand a democratization of AI, calling for a participatory approach and the inclusion of more diverse communities into the creation of AI systems as well as for an establishment of public AI infrastructures and accessibility for everyone. Researchers particularly emphasize the need for a counterbalance to the power position which big technology companies inhabit within the AI industry. By positioning themselves at the center of application, infrastructure and discourse, these companies succeed to steer the AI debate for their own profit, shaping not only what direction its research and development takes, but also the way AI is regulated. 

It is also these companies, as I present in this PhD project, that have appropriated the democratization discourse to their economic benefit. They are promoting their products to be beneficial and empowering to all of its users, allowing for societal progress; to be inclusive and representative of everyone; and to enable collaborative efforts in AI development. In my PhD project I critically analyze the AI democratization discourse as propelled by big technology companies such as Google, IBM and OpenAI by detailing the narratives they establish but also the corporate strategies they pursue within this discursive frame. Here, I propose not to merely center the debate of democratization around notions of access. Rather, as I argue, it is important to go beyond viewing AI as powerful and opaque entity which needs to be democratized and to shed light on specific ML techniques and the power dynamics in which they emerge. Taking up this perspective means shifting the focus from considering power in the form of ownership of AI infrastructures to a more detailed consideration of how power operates through ML algorithms. In this way, we can trace the dominance big tech companies exert in detail, by analyzing how they shape AI values and infrastructures according to economic rationales.

Opacity is the focal point of my thesis. It is, to be precise, the point of entry, passage, departure, and re-entry the life work of Édouard Glissant, some of whose concepts, and this is one important segment of the thesis, in my opinion call for a coupling with cybernetic thought.

Opacity will serve to argue that the histories and epistemologies, and therefore materialities, of how we make sense of and understand media (and) technology are closely intertwined with the histories and epistemologies of – hereby echoing Glissant – how we relate to each other and ourselves. This, at first, does not seem to be a radical claim, for media (and) technology are known to become evident where they intermediate, namely mediate two things in order for them to carry out their differentialities. These media, of course, not only tend to remain uncertain, undetermined, and obscure. In fact, they have to be. The histories and epistemologies of relating to each other and Relation (as in how Glissant would use the term) call into the arena the question of (the nature of) understanding and suggest the negotiation of identities. So, this above-mentioned sense making shall for example include such constructs and concepts as race and blackness.

The argument I want to make is not merely concerning analogical references – say, the prevalence of the master/slave terminology in the language of informatics and engineering until today, or the reading and understanding of the black body as a (pre-)capitalist technology, as capital and/or commodity form. The argument rather links Glissants oeuvre comprised of his poetics and poetic knowledge, his understanding of and play with language, and of revolutionary concepts such as Creolization, Relation and opacity to a cybernetic epistemology, to computational knowledge and realities and to contemporary politics.

More information here.

Contact

Nelly Y. Pinkrah

In today’s technocapitalist cities, big tech companies have become neighbors, employers, and even critical public infrastructure providers – a standard in modern urban life. Though their technologies promise to make austerity-ridden cities ‘smarter’ and to improve administrative efficiency, tech monopolists are really battling over who will control and profit from shaping future urban narratives. They achieve this by experimenting with and gradually taking over urban environments, increasingly eliminating uncertainty and securing outcomes that serve their interests.

One of these ‘future-makers’ is the tech company Amazon. Often only perceived as ‘virtual warehouse’, the corporation has long been extending its power: in addition to being a retail giant, Amazon is increasingly organizing (smart) cities around its last mile logistics and running hugely profitable data centers as a partner to public governments. By lobbying for and providing certain services, Amazon has now become rather infrastructural. On its second biggest market, Germany, it offers future disaster relief and private substitutions of welfare goods. In other words, Amazon uses current uncertainties as powerful governing strategy. Its security gadgets only feed further insecurities of its customers, thus establishing a profitable pipeline of predictable behavior to reign over spaces, capital, and futures. But what kind of ‘cities of certainties’ result from these manufactured uncertainties, who are they for, and what kind of future do they represent?

In my Ph.D. research project, I am interested in the tense negotiations around the design of (public) infrastructures between private tech actors like Amazon; local administrations; and urbanites. Drawing on three ethnographic case studies – from Amazon’s smart home devices, its delivery infrastructure, to its cloud services – the project empirically explores how uncertainties of our time are politically instrumentalized by tech companies to fit their business and design defaults and enclose the potential of diverse digitized cities. Critically and creatively ‘unboxing’ future-making practices, my research asks how the public sector and citizens are questioning, resisting, and perhaps even sabotaging the current ‘city-on-demand’-culture of Big Tech. How can they regain power about public discourses around futures in the race to care for democracy and a broken planet?

CONTACT
Maja-Lee Voigt