Dr. Svea Bräunert

Research associate at the design department of University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and co-leader of the research project “Border Values. Operational Relationships between Climate and Migration”.

Research Areas

Digital Culture
Visual Culture
Modern and Contemporary Art, Photography, Time-Based Media
Text-Image-Relations
Flight, Migration, Borders
Environmental Media, Non-Human Sensing

Current Research Projects

Optical Attitudes: The Drone’s Visual Culture
Crossings: Aesthetic Counters of Sensory Border Surveillance
Returning Modernism: Social Abstraction and Global Conflict
19*20

Selected Publications

Books

Method: Sasha Kurmaz. Talents 38. Berlin, Heidelberg: C/O Berlin, Kehrer, 2016. (together with Sasha Kurmaz)

Gespenstergeschichten: Der linke Terrorismus der RAF und die Künste. Berlin: Kadmos, 2015.

Edited Books and Journals

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Photographic Practice. Special Issue of Monatshefte. Volume 113, Number 3 (Fall 2021). (together with Tanja Nusser)

To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare. St. Louis, Chicago: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, University of Chicago Press, 2016. (together with Meredith Malone)

Essays and Conversations

Nicht-Sichtbarkeit und Nicht-Sehen: Hito Steyerls apophäne Umschreibungen eines Drohnenbildes. In: Jonas Etten, Julian Jochmaring (ed.): Nach der ikonischen Wende: Aktualität und Geschichte eines Paradigmas. Berlin: Kadmos, 2021: 150-168.

Empathy and the Image under Surveillance Capitalism: Interview with Photographer Tomas van Houtryve. In: Kathrin Maurer, Andreas Immanuel Graae (ed.): Drone Imaginaries: The Power of Remote Vision. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2021: 74-88.

Shifting the Pattern: Lateral Thinking and Machine Vision. In: The Senses and Society. Volume 15, Issue 3 (Fall 2020): 259-271.

Vertikale Selbst- und Feindbilder: Wie uns die Drohne sehen lässt. In: Marie-Luisa Frick, Martin Gronau, Philipp Hubmann (ed.): Politische Aporien: Akteure und Praktiken des Dilemmas. Wien: Turia+Kant, 2016: 229-251.

Starting Winter 2022/23, Svea Bräunert is a DAAD-sponsored Visiting Scholar at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam where she teaches in the program of European Media Studies. From 2016 to 2022, she was DAAD Visiting Associate Professor in German and Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Svea holds a long-standing connection to Potsdam, having worked as a postdoc at ZeM in 2016 as well as in the DFG-sponsored Research Training Group “Visibility and Visualization: Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge” from 2013 to 2015.

Together with scholars from Potsdam and Cincinnati, she has initiated the DFG-funded project “Daring Media: Practices and Conditions of Risk and Courage in Contemporary Cultures“ to build an international partnership between the ZeM and the Niehoff Center for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

She sits on the International Advisory Board of the Network for “Drones Imaginaries and Communities” at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense where she was also involved previously with the Network for “Research on Drones and Aesthetics.”

Svea collaborates regularly with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, realizing exhibitions and publications such as “To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare.”