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a thesis on the role of images in Michel Foucault's research, which benefited considerably from the philosopher's unpublished manuscripts on painting.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.
Mengzhu An
Emma_an11@outlook.com
Mengzhu An is a post-doc researcher at Masaryk University. She received her PhD in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her doctoral research examined the moral experiences of urban Chinese parents raising autistic children within the postsocialist care regime. She also explores China’s growing early intervention market for developmental disabilities, shifting family and intimate dynamics in ASD households, and the emerging disability rights and neurodiversity movements. Her work engages with medical anthropology, the ethical and affective turns in anthropology, disability studies, STS, and feminism.
As part of the EMOROB project, she is conducting ethnographic research in China, where AI-driven autism technologies are rapidly expanding. She is particularly interested in how social robots and affective programming reshape autism diagnosis and therapy; how ethical imaginaries of technology inform the development and commercialization of robotics; and how ideas of personhood and sociality are embedded in robotic design.
Her work has appeared in Medical Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, and Teaching Anthropology. She is also an editor of TyingKnots, a Sinophone public anthropology media platform.
Katarína Azzamová
katarina.azzamova@mail.muni.cz
Katarína is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University, where she contributes to teaching courses such as contemporary social and cultural theories, theoretical sociology, or the history of anthropology. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the intersection between spiritual and biomedical paradigms in meditation, drawing on research across spiritual and neuroscience-based practices and systems of knowledge.
From 2022-2025, she has been involved in an interdisciplinary qualitative research project on automobility — a collaborative effort between Masaryk University and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna (supported by the Czech Science Foundation and Austrian Science Fund, PI Csaba Szaló). Informed by post-humanist theory, phenomenology, and STS frameworks, the project investigates interactions between humans, infrastructures, and non-human actors in road environments.
Since 2025, Katarina takes part in the EMOROB project, where she conducts ongoing fieldwork in research labs in Spain, developing robotic technologies designed to reduce social isolation and support emotional well-being. Her research focuses on engineers’ narratives about human–robot interaction. Katarina is also a psychologist and a psychotherapist in training, currently undergoing education in systemic therapy with a dialogical, “postmodern” approach. During 2024, she has been professionally engaged in psychological counselling.
Miroslava Smolková
smolkova@fss.muni.cz
Miroslava Smolková is a research staff member and a former Master's student of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of more-than-human sociality, posthumanism, and multispecies entanglements, with a particular focus on the ethical and relational dimensions of human-nonhuman interactions. Within the EMOROB project, she explores anthropological perspectives on the autonomy of social assistive robots, combining field research with critical approaches to normative emotions and sociality in human-robot interaction.
Zuzana Talašová
ztalasova@mail.muni.cz
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.
Mateusz Kowalczyk
mateusz.kowalczyk@akademia.gda.pl
Mateusz Kowalczyk is a visual artist, performer, and researcher based in Warsaw, Poland, working at the intersection of socially engaged art, XR-based environments, and neurodiversity advocacy. As a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, his research explores how immersive technologies communicate neurodivergent experiences through embodiment, haptics, and interactive storytelling.
His practice includes institutional, collective, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Kowalczyk is a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2024) within the Solitude Exchange Network. His works have been exhibited at leading institutions such as the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Zachęta National Gallery, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. He is active in post-artistic initiatives as a member of the Office for Postartistic Services, within which he researches social and environmental changes related to lignite coal mining in the tri-border region of Germany, Poland, and Czechia (Turów mine case).
In 2025, he joined the EMOROB team as a recipient of the Visegrad Fund Fellowship. Currently, during his first research mobility in Brno this summer, he has begun investigating the visual layer of the Moravian Karst caves, aiming to develop virtual XR environments that explore time perception, isolation, and emotional experience from a neurodivergent perspective.
Nikola Bartková
551641@fss.muni.cz
Nikola Bartková is a research team assistant in the EMOROB project, where she provides various administrative support, ensuring the smooth running of research and outreach activities. Her role involves assistance with literature reviews and data management, coordinating the planning and facilitation of events and workshops, and maintaining the project’s public visibility through managing EMOROB website and social media.
Alongside her position in EMOROB, Nikola develops her own research interests at the intersection of sociology, biology, and science and technology studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Charles University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Sociology at Masaryk University. Her work broadly explores human-animal relations in contemporary societies, with a focus on urban environments, public perceptions of wildlife, and the social dimensions of multispecies coexistence. She’s most interested in topics such as neurodiversity, posthumanism and evolutionary biology.
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.