Prof. Dr. Katia Schwerzmann

Acting Professor | Vertretungsprofessur | Institut für Medienwissenschaft

Room + Contact
Raum: GB 1/134
Telefon: 0234 / 32 – 25073
E-Mail: katia.schwerzmann@rub.de

Sprechstunde: Nach Vereinbarung über Calendly

Vita

  • 10.2025 • Acting Professor, Institute of Media Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
  • Since 05.2025 • Associate Researcher, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen | SFB Virtual Lifeworld, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
  • 11.2025 – 04.2025 • Thyssen@KWI Fellow, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen
  • 11.2022 – 10.2024 • Postdoc Research Associate (WiMi), Ruhr-Universität Bochum
    Research Project Interact! New Forms of Social Interaction with Intelligent Systems
  • 05.2020 – 09.2022 • Postdoc Research Associate and Lecturer (WiMi), Bauhaus Universität Weimar
    Graduate School Media Anthropology (GRAMA)
  • 07.2019 – 04.2020 • Postdoc Visiting Scholar, Duke University, NC, USA
    Program in Literature with Prof. Mark B. Hansen and Prof. Luciana Parisi
  • 04.2019 – 06.2019 • Postdoc Research Associate, UC Santa Cruz, CA, USA
    Feminist Studies Department & History of Consciousness Department with Prof. Karen Barad
  • 10.2017 – 03.2019 • Postdoc Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA
    Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory with Prof. Liliane Weissberg.
    MIRA Research Group (Department of Philosophy) with Prof. Lisa Miracchi
  • 05.2016 – 03.2017 • Research Associate (WiMi), Freie Universität Berlin
    Institute of Philosophy, Prof. Sybille Krämer
  • 12.2016 • Joint PhD, Philosophy
    Freie Universität Berlin and Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Dissertation Title: Theorie des graphischen Feldes. Summa cum laude

Arbeitsschwerpunkte

  • Hauntology and dispossession
  • Technological underpinnings of fundamental concepts in political theory
  • Race as technology
  • Machine learning and statistical modeling
  • Genealogy of algorithmic rationalities
  • Generative AI’s normative rationality

Veröffentlichungen

  • Monograph in Preparation • Toward a Hauntology of Touch.
    Reworking what Nancy calls the “Law of Touch” as the law of sociality, Toward a Hauntology of Touch analyzes touch as a set of culture-technical operations that shape the space between bodies; operations by which bodies become subjects for one another, form communities, and enter into the political realm. By critically discussing a selection of concepts fundamental to modern and contemporary Western political philosophy in terms of touching operations, the book cast a new light on issues pertaining to appropriation, (self-)possession, self-determination, affectability, dispossession, and exclusion. It advances haunting as a form of touch that, invisibly yet significantly, shifts boundaries and borders. A haunting touch designates a form of ethics and politics that would acknowledge the necessity for self-determination while simultaneously unsettling identity and self-possession.
  • Monograph • Theorie des graphischen Feldes. Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020.
    Theorie des graphischen Feldes demonstrate—through a deconstructive and media-theoretical analysis of central philosophical positions on writing, drawing, diagrammatic representation, and schematism (Derrida, Kant, Nancy, Heidegger, Goodman)—the different ways in which Western philosophy has systematically repressed corporality in processes of sense- and meaning-making. Theorie des graphischen Feldes advances touch (between the body, the mark, and the surface of inscription) as the elemental moment for the production of meaning.
  • Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
  • “‘Desired Behaviors’: Alignment and the Emergence of a Machine Learning Ethics.” Co-written with Alexander Campolo. AI & Society, 2025, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02272-3.
  • “From Enclosure to Foreclosure and Beyond: Opening AI’s Totalizing Logic.” Philpapers (Preprint), 2025. https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHFET-6. (accepted with minor revisions at AI & Society)
  • “From Rules to Examples. Machine Learning’s Type of Authority.” Co-written with Alexander Campolo. Big Data & Society 10, no. 2 (2023): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231188725.
  • “‘One Unique You’: Affective Attachments and DNA-Testing as Ethnotechnological Apparatus.” Co-written with Deanna Cachoian-Schanz. Social Text 41, no. 1 (2023): 71–97. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10174982.
  • “Abolish! Against the Use of Risk Assessment Algorithms at Sentencing in the US Criminal Justice System.” Philosophy & Technology 34, no. 4 (2021): 1883–1904. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00491-2.
  • “Moralisation de la vie nue—transhumanisme et biopolitique.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 341 (2021): 227–43. https://doi.org/10.4000/rsh.432.
  • Nothing Happening Here (Kelsey Brod, Katia Schwerzmann, Jordan Sjol, Alexander Strecker, and Kristen Tapson). 2021. “Nothing Re-fused: Performing the Neo-Institution.” APRJA 10 (1): 85–93. URL: https://doi.org/10.7146/aprja.v10i1.128189.
  • “‘La Lettre Morte’—Friedrich Kittler en correspondance avec les poststructuralistes.” Appareil 19 (2017): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.4000/appareil.2552.
  • “‘Une sorte de remontée vers le corps’. Skizze einer Ästhetik der körperlichen Responsivität.” Kodikas/Code. Ars Semeiotica 37, no. 3/4 (2014): 249–60.
  • Edited Volume • Szenen Kritischer Relationalität. Co-edited with Charlotte Bolwin, Jasmin Degeling, Martin Kallmeyer, Gereon Rahnfeld, Nathalie Schäfer. Lüneburg: meson press, 2024. https://meson.press/books/szenen-kritischer-relationalitaet/.
  • Book Chapters
  • “Die normative Logik der Anpassung von Large Language Models. Wissen, Subjektivität, Sozialität.” In Internationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie Und Medienästhetik – 2025, edited by Beate Ochsner and Markus Rautzenberg. 1–17. Lüneburg: meson press, 2025 (in press).
  • “LLMs.” In Virtuelle Universität, edited by Breil Patrizia and Sprenger Florian. Transcript, 2025 (in press).
  • “Ruled by the Representation Space: On the University’s Embrace of Large Language Models.” May 6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.03513.
  • “Einführung: Relationieren—Eine Kritische Operation.” In Szenen Kritischer Relationalität. Co-written with Charlotte Bolwin, Jasmin Degeling, Martin Kallmeyer, Gereon Rahnfeld, and Nathalie Schäfer. 7–21. Lüneburg: meson press, 2024.
  • “Begegnung (Donna J. Haraway).” In Berühren Lesen, edited by Hanna Sohns and Johannes Ungelenk, 28–33. München: August Verlag, 2021.
  • “Wirken und Wissen im Wechselspiel: Das Verhältnis zwischen Schema und Bild.” In Nach der ikonischen Wende. Aktualität und Geschichte eines Paradigmas, edited by Jonas Etten and Julian Jochmaring, 91–105. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021.
  • “‘Coupling Parts That Are Not Supposed to Touch’ oder die Berührung als Kritik.” In Tangieren. Szenen des Berührens, edited by Sandra Fluhrer and Alexander Waszynski, 283–99. Baden-Baden: Rombach, 2020.
  • “Introduction au Dossier Critique ‘Théorie des média.’” Acta Fabula 19, no. 8 (October 2018). https://10.58282/acta.11596.
  • “L’haptique et la question du fond. Réflexion autour du sens du fond dans les pratiques graphiques indiciaires à partir de Riegl et Maldiney.” In Xi Dong/Ouest-Est. Voies esthétiques, edited by François Félix, 50–75. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2015.
  • “Dimensionen des Graphismus. Die drei Pole der Linie.” In Über Kritzeln. Graphismen zwischen Schrift, Bild, Text und Zeichen, edited by Christian Driesen, Rea Köppel, Benjamin Meyer-Kramer, and Eike Wittrock, 39–57. Berlin, Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012.

Vorträge (Auswahl)

  • 26.09.2025 • Generative AI’s Normative Rationality: Whose Values and For What Purpose?
    Keynote | Workshop “Aligning Al with Society” UNC Chapel Hill, USA | Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (25.-26.09.2025)
    Invited by Jana Hector and Lisa Koeritz, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
  • 03.09.2025 • Generative AI’s Normative Rationality as a Challenge to Scientific Research
    Talk | Special Event of the Center for Advanced Internet Studies
    Invited by Dr. Esther Laufer, Director of the CAIS College to further develop the institute profile
  • 20.06.2025 • Large Language Models, Machine Reading, and the Human Factor as Supplement
    Invited Talk | BrAIve New Worlds: Literature in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Concepts, Genres, Model Interpretations (19.-21.06.2025)
    Organized by Dr. Angela Gencarelli, Prof. Christine Schwanecke, Dr. Danica Stojanovic-Schaffrath, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Graz, Austria
  • 11.11.2024 • L’intelligence artificielle comme projet de normativisation : vers de nouvelles formes de pouvoir et de subjectivité
    Lecture • Invited by Prof. Olivier Voirol, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 27.06.2024 • Von “outliers” zu “edge cases”: Machine Learnings Umgang mit Minderheitspositionen
    Invited Talk | Conference: Critical Computing. Calculating with(in) Relations (27.-28.06.2024)
    Organized by Irina Raskin and Prof. Ulrike Bergermann, Braunschweig University of Art
  • 30.03.2023 • From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’: Data as Example in Machine Learning, with Alex Campolo
    Talk | Conference: Data (Re)Makes the World
    Organized by the Information Society Project, Yale Law School, New Haven, USA
  • 07.05.2022 • Die Zukunft dokumentieren. Zur paranoiden Logik des Machine Learning
    Keynote | Conference: Dokument Werden. Zeitlichkeit|Arbeit|Materialisierung,
    Organized by the DFG-Graduate School Das Dokumentarische. Exzess und Entzug, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
  • 16.06.2021 • Algorithmes prédictifs, cybernétisation de la société et biopolitique
    Invited Talk | Conference: La fiction posthumaniste: projections, représentations et critiques du transhumanisme (15.-16.06.2021)
    Organized by Prof. Mara Magda Maftei, Université Paris-Nanterre, France
  • 25.03.2019 • The Performativity of Predictions. Algorithms and Sentencing
    Invited Lecture | “Theorizing” Lecture Series
    CompLit Department, University of Pennsylvania, USA
  • 08.07.2021 • Nancy’s Law of Touch and Its Violation in the Undercommons
    Talk | DFG-Graduate School Medienanthropologie GRAMA
    Bauhaus Universität Weimar
  • 13.04.2018 • “Coupling Parts that are not Supposed to Touch”—Performativität der Berührung in den neuen Materialismen
    Talk | Conference: Tangieren. Praktiken und Arrangements des Berührens in den performativen Künsten
    Organized by the DFG-Network “Berühren: Literarische, mediale & politische Figurationen” Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg