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.
Marián Koval
koval@fss.muni.cz
Marián Koval is a project administrator at the Office for Research and Project Support at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University. Since 2022, he has provided administrative support for research and operational projects.
Marián is a master’s degree student of European Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies. He’s most interested in topics such as the democratic deficit in the EU, economic matters of the EU, and European identity and values.
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.
Eva Theunissen
evatheunissen@mail.muni.cz
Eva Theunissen is a postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She has a background in social sciences (PhD), film studies and visual culture (master) and philosophy (bachelor). She defended her doctoral thesis Queering the View. A multi-sited study on bodies, digital/visual technologies and ethnographic invisibilities as member of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Digital Cultures Research Centre (DCRC) and the VR Lab at the University of the West of England. (UWE).
Eva combines an interest in digital/visual culture and technologies with feminist and queer theory and methods and is fascinated with the utopian and often dematerialized vision of the human body in “virtual” culture scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s. Through frameworks such as assemblage thinking, her work examines possibilities for gaining a deeper understanding of the multiple relationships between images, bodies and technologies and the increasing presence and agency of technologies in social science research today.
Eva has published in journals such as American Anthropologist and New Media & Society.
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.
Past team members
Eva Šlesinger
slesinger@fss.muni.cz
Eva Šlesinger is a member of the Research and project support office at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University. Since 2017, she has been providing methodological and administrative support for national and international projects. Within the project, she holds the position of Project manager.
Eva studied sociology and social anthropology at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University. During her studies, she was interested in the topic of social exclusion. She has work experience in the non-profit and corporate sectors.
Hana Drštičková
471429@mail.muni.cz
Hana Drštičková is an interdisciplinary researcher. They studied Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Studies MU and Intermedia Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts BUT. Currently, they are working on their PhD research at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. Their academic interest lies mainly in intersectional, neuroqueer, politically engaged areas of study, spanning sociology, disability studies, gender studies and environmental humanities. They are passionate about blurring boundaries of all kinds, climate justice and feminist activism.
Alexandra Vrhel
460196@mail.muni.cz
Alexandra Vrhel is a doctoral candidate and junior researcher at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University in Brno. She draws from the fields of sociology and anthropology of medicine, disability studies and neurodiversity studies. Her research focuses on subjectivities defined by psychiatric diagnoses with a specific interest in so-called neurodivergent subjectivities and their negotiation in the context of neoliberal capitalist ideals of social functionality. She is also interested in how neuropsychiatric knowledge shapes the cultural notions of personhood and humanness.
She completed a graduate program in Anthropology at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University and is currently an adjunct lecturer in the same program.
Alexandra´s paper on ADHD subjectivity and the dilemma of authenticity will soon be published in the journal Subjectivity.
Ondřej Vodička
512271@mail.muni.cz
Ondřej Vodička is an assistant to the expert team. He supports the team with preparing research, ensuring organizational matters, managing social networks, and assisting with other necessary tasks for research.
Ondřej is a bachelor’s degree student of sociology at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University. He is interested in social stratification and political sociology.
Kristina Korchová
520262@mail.muni.cz
Kristina Korchová is a sociology student at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University.
In this research, she actively supports the team by assisting in various tasks. While she may be new to the professional world, she is enthusiastic about learning new things and dedicated to the research process. She is excited to broaden her academic background and collaborate with experts in the field.