Team
Eva Šlesingerová
The principal investigator in EMOROB
eslesi@fss.muni.cz
Eva Šlesingerová is Associate Professor in sociology at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She works as deputy head of Department of Sociology/program Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social Studies. Eva´s primary research interest and expertise lies in the application of insights from sociology, social anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). Specifically, she uses perspectives from medical humanities or posthuman and more-than-human studies to the study of artificial life, emotion AI and human-robot interactions.
As a Marie Curie-Skłodowska fellow, she was affiliated with Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main where she was a member of the research group Biotechnologies, Nature and Society. There she has become a member of the international network LaSST. Eva has previously published her research in a monography titled We, Other Utopians/Recombinant DNA, Editing Genome and Artificial Life (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) which won the prize “MUNI Scientist 2022” for an excellent research publication.
Eva´s papers have appeared in Body&Society, Medicine, Health Care&Philosophy or Social Studies Information.
Ilaria Fornacciari
fornacciari@fss.muni.cz
Ilaria Fornacciari is a postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her teaching and research interests include Visual Studies (with a particular interest in the relationship between the historicity of vision and the cultural construction and modes of circulation of images), modern aesthetics and the historical-political notion of modernity, contemporary French philosophy, the attention economy and the critique of the assumptions of dominant organizational models. For the EMOROB project, Ilaria will seek to link discursive analysis and situated knowledge in investigating the visual and narrative dimensions of the historical construction of human-robot social interactions.
Former student of the doctoral school "Esthétique, sciences et technologies des Arts" at the University of Paris 8 and former fellow of the Graduiertenkolleg "Das Bild als Artefakt" of the "Eikones - Bildkritik" centre in Basel, she defended a thesis on the role of images in Michel Foucault's research, which benefited considerably from the philosopher's unpublished manuscripts on painting. Foucault et les images : pratiques de l'image et visibilité entre analyse archéologique et irréductibilité critique (published in open access). Ilaria has been an adjunct lecturer in Philosophy and Sociology of Art at the BSB Université Bourgogne - Franche Comté in Dijon and has been involved in various collaborative philosophy projects in Switzerland.
She has published in IMAGES: Journal for Visual Studies, Cartografie sociali. Rivista di sociologia e scienze umane and has been guest editor for Studia Philosophica, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Philosophie.
Nikola Bartková
551641@fss.muni.cz
Nikola Bartková is a project assistant and master’s degree student of Sociology at Masaryk University, Czech republic. Since 2024, she provides administrative support for research and manages EMOROB social media.
She’s most interested in topics such as neurodiversity, posthumanism and evolutionary biology. Having previously completed her bachelor’s degree of Biology at Charles University, she now combines her interest in both fields of natural and social sciences.
Werner Binder
binder@fss.muni.cz
Werner Binder is an assistant professor at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). After studies in Mannheim, Potsdam and Berlin, he earned his PhD at the University of Konstanz with a thesis on the Abu Ghraib scandal. His fields of interest are: Sociological theory, cultural sociology, textual and visual methods of interpretation, the analysis of political and other public discourses, and, most recently, the sociology of artificial intelligence. Among his recent publications are “Memory Culture, the Civil Sphere and Right-Wing Populism in Germany: The Resistible Rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)”, “AlphaGo’s Deep Play. Technological Breakthrough as Social Drama” and “Technology as (Dis-)Enchantment. AlphaGo and the Meaning-Making of Artificial Intelligence.”
Csaba Szaló
szalo@mail.muni.cz
Csaba Szaló teaches sociology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He studied sociology at the Masaryk University and political theory at the Manchester University. He has an enduring interest in social theory and cultural sociology. In the previous years, he has been working on urban memory, the trans-generational transmission of trauma, and existential spatiality. His recent work focuses on the phenomenology of embodied understanding. He has published two books, one on theories of transnational migration and one on the cultural memory of places (both in Czech). His last article, „The existential spatiality of rebellion: Insubordination, counter‐conduct, and places“ was published in Sociology Compass.
Zuzana Musilová
musilova@fss.muni.cz
Zuzana Musilová is a project support assistant at the Office for Research and Project Support at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University. She provides administrative support for several research projects.
While completing her studies in Linguistics and English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Zuzka began her career in the localization industry. After several exciting years in this field, she embarked on a new personal project — starting a family. Now, she has joined the Faculty of Social Studies, where she supports various interesting research projects.