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Ph.D. projects
In the following, some current dissertation projects at the institute are presented in more detail.
Postindustrial Water – Entanglements in Postindustrial Times (Arbeitstitel)
Juliana Lux
Juliana Lux's dissertation project focusses on the connection between water and (post-)industriality. She is particularly interested in what perspectives on possible futures, presents and pasts a view sharpened by "industrial water" might open up. What interconnections of (post-)industrialities become visible? Where can industrial water be found and where does it lead in times of a global climate crisis?
Industrial water describes the water that is used in industrial processes. Whether in the extraction of natural resources, in the manufacturing process or in post-landscapes, water surfaces in industry and in that what follows it. Nevertheless, in everyday life it is often not clear where water has already flowed, stood or evaporated.
In her ethnographic research, Juliana Lux follows industrial water and, starting from Germany, tries to think global and temporal interdependencies through water. The question of what industriality or post-industriality can actually mean and what could come afterwards forms an anchor point.
Supervision: Prof. Dr Ina Dietzsch (Philipps University Marburg)
“Hacking UNESCO” The Art of Coding, the Demoscene, and Its Digital Cultural Heritage
Felix Ruppert
In his dissertation, Felix Ruppert examines the possibilities, opportunities, and challenges of including genuinely digital cultures in UNESCO's cultural heritage concepts, using the international demoscene as a case study.
The demoscene is a globally networked digital art scene that emerged from the software cracker scene in the 1980s. It's uniquely characterized by a blend of collaboration and competition. Participants, often working in teams, create non-commercial, audiovisual real-time computer programs called "demos" that showcase technical virtuosity and innovation. These artifacts are displayed and voted on by the audience at competitions (compos) held at demo parties worldwide. These gatherings are central hubs for knowledge and technology transfer, creative exchange, and social networking.
The Art of Coding initiative, founded in 2019, aims to have the demoscene recognized as an international intangible UNESCO cultural heritage. Due to their efforts, the demoscene was already included in the national intangible cultural heritage lists of seven countries by July 2025, and an international application is currently being prepared.
With his research, Felix Ruppert ethnographically accompanies this process, reconstructing the steps already taken. The work not only enriches cultural heritage research with crucial ethnographic insights into digital communities but also contributes to the visibility and appreciation of digital artistic practices and subcultures. The findings promise to provide relevant impetus for forward-looking cultural policy and a deeper understanding of digital communities and their forms of practice.
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Manfred Seifert (Philipps University Marburg)
Learning Skills with Media Instructions (working title)
Jan Dittrich
Jan Dittrich researches how people use instructions to acquire skills. To do this, he compares the use of recipes for gluten-free baking with the use of instructions for programming. Instead of assuming a separation between planning and execution, it is assumed that this skillful action requires the coordination of attention and situation (Ingold, 2001) as well as reflection in the action itself (Schön 1982).
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Götz Bachmann (University Bremen)
Unraveling NatureChildhoods with Young Humans and More-than-humans: Entangled Ethnographic Explorations based on Karen Barad’s Agential Realism (Working title)
Felizitas Juen
Following the concept of NatureCultures, Felizitas Juen deals in her dissertation with NatureChildhoods from a posthumanist/new-materialist perspective. How do connections between materialities, atmospheres, animals, plants and children unfold? To investigate this question, she has been conducting research at the Zurich University of Teacher Education since 2022 in an SNF project with young humans in institutional educational settings in German-speaking Switzerland.
The theoretical background of the dissertation project is the work of the physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, which sheds new light on material-discursive practices and ethics (Barad 2007). This raises new questions about how constellations, encounters or boundaries are unfolding when humans are not the central actors. The dissertation contributes to the analysis of the entanglement of childhood and nature, or young humans and more-than-humans, as children are actors that have received little attention in more-than-human approaches and multispecies ethnographies of Empirischer Kulturwissenschaft. The intraactions of young humans and more-than-humans will be explored ethnographically.
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Ina Dietzsch (Philipps University Marburg)
3D Printing as a Popular Practice
Private 3D Printing at the Intersection of Engineering, Utopia, and Pleasure (Working Title)
Toni Reichert
Since the early 2010s, 3D printing has been firmly established as one of the media technologies associated with extensive socio-technical transformation potential. In culturally and medially vibrant discourses, 3D printing has since been repeatedly attributed a key role in the implementation and dissemination of digitally networked manufacturing technologies.
With the commercial breakthrough of affordable and user-friendly 3D desktop printers, however, a remarkable spread of 3D printing has been observed in recent years, especially among private users. Beyond specialized applications in industry and design, 3D printing is currently becoming an increasingly common part of everyday design and manufacturing practices. On digital platforms such as Thingiverse, Printables, and Makerworld, private users can currently discover, share, and modify millions of 3D printing designs.
Against the backdrop of these developments, Toni Reichert's doctoral project examines the cultural dimensions of private 3D printing within everyday practices. The ethnographically oriented study aims to generate substantial contributions to a cultural analysis of 3D printing as a popular everyday practice grounded by empirical “thick descriptions.”
Theoretically, the research project is guided by the premise that the development and stabilization of everyday use of technology is of central importance for an adequate understanding of innovation processes and their sociocultural effects (Bausinger 1981; Beck 1997; Rammert & Schubert 2006). Empirically, the dissertation project focuses firstly on the individual and collective uses that emerge in the course of the integration of 3D printing into the systems of relevance, action, and meaning of everyday life. Secondly, it asks for potential sociocultural implications and effects that arise from the certain ways private users have come to adopt digital (re)production technology.
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Ina Dietzsch (Philipps Universtity Marburg)
Experiencing the Shoah Digitally? Memory Practice in Tension between Technology, Emotional Politics and Temporality (working title)
Janina Schwarz-Ennen
Janina Schwarz-Ennen's Ph.D. project deals with experiences of remembrance that have become possible/necessary through technological innovations, starting from the thesis that the Shoah is presented specifically at different times and in different media for different target groups.
Digital projects with their implicit and explicit basic assumptions, goals, claims, their conceptions, and implementations as well as their use serve as a basis. The focus is on the Lebenswelten that have already been constituted by digitalization processes, in which people now act, learn, feel, and also remember. This work is particularly dedicated to feeling, because hardly any other field acts, uses, and produces emotions as strongly as the field of remembering the Shoah.
The relevance of temporality for this research project opens up, on the one hand, through the death of contemporary witnesses and, on the other hand, through the speed of technical development, whereby different drafts of a digital culture of remembrance of the future are formulated. The field is constituted between the 'race against time' and the call to 'keep up with the times'. The high speed with which corresponding projects are developed and researched interdisciplinarily as well as the connection between past, present, and future are understood as influencing factors that must always be taken into account, both conceptually and in terms of content.
Supervision: Prof. Dr. Ina Dietzsch (Philipps University Marburg)