Team

My interest goes out to how science deals with biological diversity, in particular through the collection, analysis, and ordering of data on it. With that I approach natural history collections as I might a DNA database: as a particular way of doing data and diversity.

How can we strengthen the link between digitization and digital methods of knowledge transfer on the one hand and the debate about the social role played by museums on the other?

Museums are places of experience and affect. My research focuses on the politics of affect in the museum space and locates the field of history of emotions within museums through a postcolonial lens.

In my work, I take a critical look at the power asymmetries that shape the collaboration and knowledge exchange taking place between universities, museums, and social movements.

We want to know how museums can generate social cohesion and where adjustments still need to be made.

When museums are seen as contact zones, their organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship - a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.

With their extensive collections, research museums form critical hubs in the border traffic between nature, culture, and society. My research examines this border traffic in the context of digitalization and inquires into the political and social effects of the advanced datafication of nature.

Museums are not just archives of human heritage but also places to conduct debates about who has control of the cultural narrative of that heritage, about inclusion, exclusion, participation, and how digitalization can transcend boundaries.

Taking a look at the history of museums shows that museums, despite their intended function of preserving our cultural heritage in as unaltered a state as possible, have undergone dynamic reform processes that have been fiercely debated in public but also internally. The current crisis of the museum, the demand for it to be reinvented – these two things stand in a long tradition of conflicts that have played a considerable role in shaping this institution.