This summer, you have the opportunity to get to know some of the brilliant postdoctoral researchers at our university. Our portrait series highlights the diversity within this group of University of Graz research talents - and obviously the fascinating research that they do. Here are four questions for…
Laura Jung, Centre for Southeast European Studies
1) Tell us a little about yourself, and your journey to become a researcher at Uni Graz.
My interests and research topics have always been quite varied – before moving to academia, I spent many years working in the arts in London and Berlin, and in my undergraduate studies I researched artistic movements during the Bolshevik revolution. Later, this interdisciplinary curiosity took me to the intersections of politics, science/technology/medicine, and history: my PhD research at the University of Sussex focused on the role of the trauma diagnosis in German politics from the late 19th to the late 20th century. I looked at how psychiatrists treated different groups of patients – like factory workers, soldiers, or Holocaust survivors – who had suffered some kind of traumatic injury and were seeking support from the German state. I found that the way these psychiatrists thought about their patients’ symptoms, the forms of treatment they devised, and whether they helped them claim pensions or compensation payments were deeply political: they declared certain responses to trauma “normal” and others “abnormal,” and some patients were seen as valued members of German society while others were constructed as a threat. Psychiatrists thereby not only shaped which traits were seen as “German” and “un-German,” but actively participated in waging a kind of war against those patients they saw as a threat. Often, this overlapped and reinforced a broader reactionary politics, for instance efforts to minimize workers’ rights, to reverse the 1918 revolution, and to minimize accountability and compensation for the survivors of the Holocaust. This helped me think about medical, scientific knowledge as an instrument of politics and statecraft.
After my PhD, Bilgin Ayata, who is Professor for Southeastern European Studies here at the University of Graz, invited me to lead one of the subprojects in the then-upcoming Elastic Borders project. Elastic Borders, which is funded by the NOMIS foundation, is a large, interdisciplinary project focused on the external European border. One of its pillars are three in-depth ethnographic case studies, which are conducted by my extraordinary colleagues Mirco Buoso, Artemis Fyssa, and Chiara Pagano. The other pillar of the project are large-scale overviews of the legal as well as technological underpinnings of the “elastic border” – with my subproject focusing on the latter. This means I’m researching technologies deployed in border control and surveillance, and trying to understand their underlying paradigms and methods. While empirically, it’s quite a shift from my previous work – from psychiatry to border tech, databases, and AI – there are significant continuities I am building on, such as the role of scientific knowledge in bordering processes and constituting sovereign and national collectives, the enduring power of rationalist and positivistic epistemologies in the human and natural sciences, the shifting yet persistent role of race and racial images in the sciences, to name but a few.
I also received a grant from Zukunftsfond Steiermark last year to research the impact of AI in Austrian asylum procedures, which I’m working on with Angelika Adensamer (based at Vicesse Institute in Vienna) and Bilgin Ayata. This research project, called AISYL, complements the work with Elastic Borders perfectly, as it allows me to extend the gaze all the way from the external EU borders to what is happening right here in Styria and Graz.
2) What are you currently researching, and why do you think it is important (or interesting)?
I’m mainly focused on two things right now. For the Elastic Borders project, I am looking into migration prediction tools. These are data-based systems using AI and machine learning technology that aim to predict so-called future “migration flows.” In short, they use vast amounts of data, such as the number of irregularized border crossings, to social media posts and Google Searches in countries of origin, to news events about violent conflict and natural disasters, train an algorithm on this past data, and thereby create a model that makes predictions about future migration movements. I’m interested in these tools because we are seeing significant interest and investment in them at the moment – some EU agencies are developing them, and they are already being used by some EU Member States as well as humanitarian organizations – but it is still quite unclear how well they work, and whether they can improve on existing statistical methods at all. There are also some ethical questions about the data that’s being used and whether these tools should be used in border controls at all.
For the AISYL project, we are still at the beginning. The aim of the project is to create a brochure for civil society organizations which outlines specifically which AI tools we can expect to be used in Austrian asylum procedures in the near future, and which risks and opportunities they each bear. For that purpose, it was very important to us to speak to stakeholders right at the start. We conducted a focus group discussion with civil society organizations supporting asylum seekers in June, and are conducting interviews with more stakeholders over the next few weeks. Later this summer, we will also speak to other experts in the field, both in law/politics and IT, AI and machine learning.
3) What gives you joy in your everyday work life & what are some challenges?
Hands down, the best thing about my work here at the University of Graz are my colleagues. We have a wonderful team in the Elastic Borders project and there are a number of colleagues at the Centre for Southeast European Studies and other departments who I admire and value very deeply. During my PhD I worked alone, so the switch to working in a larger team was very noticeable. It’s really such a luxury to have a group of experts in the room in fields ranging from African Studies, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology and more, with vast regional expertise, to discuss ideas and concepts with.
The challenges are quite typical of early career researchers – the precarity that comes with a fixed-term contract, the difficulty in planning a mid-term future, and seeing my partner regularly, who is based in Berlin. I spend a lot of time in transit, feel overworked, and still wonder whether what I’m doing is enough. I really resent having to see my research through this lens of quantifiable achievement but feel that the job market leaves us little choice.
4) What's next for you this year/next year?
I’m looking forward to presenting work in progress at a couple of conferences in the next few months, including the DVPW (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft) in Göttingen in September. For the AISYL project, we are planning some exciting events for the fall, including a keynote lecture from a well-known scholar in AI, as well as some networking events with colleagues at Uni Graz working in similar fields.
Questions: Johanna Stadlbauer July 2024
Picture credit: Jung/privat
P.S. You can read every portrait in this interview series with Uni Graz postdocs right now!