Guests at the Division 2025

Malin Graesse is a postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger. She holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from the University of Oslo, where she also was a doctoral researcher at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). Her research centers around the relationship between design, science and the environment. In her Ph.D. project she drew on critical animal studies and ethology to explore how fishways could be understood as design interventions in ecosystem processes. Malin is currently part of the Chanse funded project DigiFREN, that studies digital aestheticization of fragile environments. Here she uses historical re-photography as a method for public engagment with environmental change in their local environments.

Malin is interested in design operates as an interface between humans and the external world. Something she has previously explored in an artiststic collaboration together with artist Annike Flo and biologist Hannah Bjørgaas, applying scenographic techniques to engage with the layers of natureculture in the urban forests around Oslo. While at the KTH Environmental Humanities Lab she will be working on turning her Ph.D. thesis into a book, and developing a project on the role of design in organizing, planning and managing water. She will also be co-organizing a workshop on sensing, together with fellow EHL guest, Noemi Quagliati, in May 2025.

Period: February-June

Giovanni is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Ca’ Foscari University, where he is working on a project focused on the reception of the concept of the “Anthropocene” within both the natural and human sciences. His background lies in the tradition of French phenomenology, with particular emphasis on the work of Merleau-Ponty, which he seeks to bring into dialogue with contemporary debates in the history of science and political epistemology.

At KTH, supported by a scholarship from the Lerici Foundation, he will work on the final part of his dissertation, which explores the intersection between scientific conceptions of the Anthropocene and its interpretations within the humanities. 

Period: February-April

Auli Viidalepp is a Research Fellow in Semiotics at the University of Tartu (Estonia). Her PhD thesis The Expected AI as a Sociocultural Construct and Its Impact on the Discourse on Technology (2023) analysed how the entanglement of the contemporary discourse(s) with narratives from (science) fiction, folklore, mythology, and religion impacts the perception of and expectations to AI systems in society. Her current post-doctoral project entails developing a semiotic perspective on the use of generative AI in information influence activities. AI-generated media interferes with our habitual communication mechanisms, disrupting the familiar linkages between authors, texts and readers (or senders, messages and receivers) and concealing intentionalities behind texts in novel ways.

Auli’s further research interests include the environmental and sociocultural implications of technology and decolonial perspectives seeking to address these issues. During her stay at the Division, Auli will be developing a semiotic model of AI as a sociomaterial system grounded in the environment. Current discourses often portray AI as something abstract and immaterial that has no physical implications at all. Since 2024, increasing attention is being paid to the planetary scale and impact of AI systems, with devastating effects on ecosystems, cultures, communities and climate. Auli’s approach combines perspectives from cultural and ecosemiotics, science and technology studies and environmental humanities, relying on concepts such as the semiosphere, text, symbolic hegemony, semiocide, envirotechnical systems and regimes, extractivism, cultural and sociotechnical imaginaries, interpretive flexibility, etc.

Period: February to May

Dr. Tamara Lorenz is an Associate Professor holding a joint appointment in Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. She got her diploma (MS) in mechanical engineering from TUM Munich, majoring in medical technology, and human factors/ergonomics, and her PhD in Systemic neuroscience and cognitive psychology from LMU Munich. Her research focusses on human-machine interaction (HMI) with new and emerging technologies such as robots, AI, and virtual reality. Dr. Lorenz’ research takes a complex systems approach that ranges from basic to applied research, with major applications in healthcare and industry 5.0. Besides research, her mission is to promote transdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving and humane technology development. Dr. Lorenz currently serves as the director for the Cognition, Action, and Perception (CAP) Group and leads the Embodied Interactive Systems Lab. She has co-founded several transdisciplinary initiatives at UC, such as the Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS) and the Industry 4.0/5.0 Institute (I45I).

Dr. Lorenz is a Digital Futures Scholar-in-Residence from March to May 2025, hosted by Robert Gioielli, Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, Director KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH, Digital Futures Faculty. During her visit to KTH Dr. Lorenz will explore actionable methods for more humane technology development and pathways for interdisciplinary engagement between engineering and the humanities. 

Period: March to May

Fotini Frangou is a recent graduate in Environmental Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, and is currently having an internship at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) at KTH. Throughout her studies she developed a deep interest in environmental ethics,sustainability and the relationship between humans and the environment. At EHL she's contributing to the Occupy Climate Change! project.

Period: March to June

Emily Gioielli is a historian of modern Europe specializing in Central and Eastern European history (especially Hungary), the history of women, gender, and sexuality, and the history of violence and regime change from a social and environmental perspective. She received her PhD in Comparative History from Central European University (Budapest) and is currently an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Her research focuses the history of women, gender, and sexuality in the post-World War I revolutions and counterrevolution in Hungary and social and environmental approaches to the history of violence. Her current project, “Cataclysm” is a socio-environmental history of the Holocaust.

Period: March to June

I am a student of the PhD programme of the Institute of History of Science (iHC-UAB) with a grant from the European Research Council in the project "CLIMASAT. Remote-sensing satellite date and global climate in Europe. 1980-2000", under the direction of Dr. Gemma Cirac. 

My research revolves around the negotiations on the production, exchange and preservation of data generated by Earth observation satellites in the period 1980-2000. The aim is to establish an account of how these data were appropriated by different international organisations in the climate debates, and to define exactly what data were used. The research focuses on the actors, activities and claims linked to data centres, databases, international organisations, conferences, networks, regulatory agencies, data sharing agreements, infrastructures, or research programmes through which the production, circulation and use of satellite data were mobilised on an international scale and what conception of climate resulted. In addition, the research also aims to understand which actors were excluded from these negotiations and for what reasons, and which actors capitalised on the negotiating power.  

Hence the main objective of my Project Thesis is to investigate the historical process that has governed the collection, calibration, storage and accumulation of Earth observation satellite data for the subsequent production of "products" and "applications" useful for the description and definition of the global Climate (databases, mathematical meteorological and climate models or maps), paying special attention to the diplomatic negotiations that have defined the knowledge regime (governance) associated with these data, resulting from the friction involved in obtaining them, in economic and political terms. 

Before starting my PhD, I studied a Bachelor's Degree in Environmental Sciences (UB) and a Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy (UB). Subsequently, I took a Master's degree in Environmental Engineering (UPC) and a Master's degree in History of Science (UAB). 

My interests include history of Earth observation satellites, science and diplomacy, history of data, history of technology and environmental history. 

Period: April to June

Noemi Quagliati is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she leads the project “Bird’s-Eye Views of the Venetian Lagoon. Planetary Visions and Birdscapes of an Aquatic Ecosystem”, and is affiliated with THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE).

Noemi received a Ph.D. in art history from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society on the subject of landscape photography in WWI Germany. Before joining Ca’ Foscari, she lectured on German eco-aesthetics at the Junior Year in Munich program (LMU and Wayne State University) and taught courses on North American photography and art at LMU’s Amerika-Institut. Over the last years, she has been a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Georgia, and the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Deutsches Museum, where she has collaborated on modernizing the museum’s historical aviation section by investigating the topic of aerial photography. She has been offered research grants from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research at RWTH Aachen University, and the European University Institute (EUI).

While at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Noemi will collaborate with Malin Kristine Graesse to organise an interdisciplinary workshop on sensing the environment beyond the ocular. She will also advance her MSCA project by researching local perceptions of specific bird species that winter in Venice and nest in the Baltic regions.

Period: April to May

Dr. Alfred Sköld is an Associate Professor of General Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. His PhD-dissertation, Relationality and Finitude: A Social Ontology of Grief (2021), focused on the existential and ethical aspects of grief, and in his currect reseach project, Emotions of Climate Activism, he investigaste the the role of emotions in a climate activist setting. The project is based on ethnographic field work and qualitative interview study with The Green Youth Movement (Den grønne ungdomsbevælgese) in Denmark. Sköld has published extensively on grief and death awareness and is the editor of several anthologies: Kampen om lykken (2020) with Svend Brinkmann, Kærlighedens kartotek (2023), Det syge samfund (2025) with Peter Clement Lund, and Det håbende dyr (2025) with Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth. He has previously been a visiting researcher at Yale University, Södertörn University, and The International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin.

During his stay at the KTH Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment, Sköld will work on his forthcoming book, Youth Climate Activism and Emotive Responses to the Ecological Crisis: Bridging Historical Context and Existential Conditions. The book broadly explores our emotional responses to the ecological crisis, with a particular focus on the relationship between grief, hope, and care within the context of climate activism.

Period: May