Nima Madjzubi "collaboration bio"

Nima Madjzubi

Goethe Universität Frankfurt
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology

I am a MA STS student at Goethe Universität Frankfurt. I studied Cognitive Neuroscience (BSc) and Cognitive AI (MSc) at Utrecht University. For my MSc I wrote a historical thesis on the economic prefigurations of Rational Choice Theory.

I have worked on a research project comparing microcredit practices between the Global North and the Global South at Radboud University Nijmegen. For a post-crisis community economies and commons project of my local contemporary art institute I have worked on infrastructure, written, and supervised student research.

Rather than considering the above as accomplishments and contributions to solutions, I see them as having provided me in learning about the problems and issues of contemporary knowledge practices.

In reflection my interest has become above all philosophical. It goes out to (de)sensitization of humans to modalities of speech, varieties of veridiction and alethurgy, different modes of existence, and singularity of pratices. This is in resisting pervasive "freely floating" (Stengers, 2005) discourses and political simplification of ecological problems and misadventures (Mitchell, 2002; 34), reversions, even of STS, to modernist dualisms, and positively pursuing cosmopolitcal contentions. My greatest concern is, after Hannah Arendt, lack of thinking and the manners with which we can "force" thought, or sensitize, and "de-psychologize," come back in to the world, come back down to earth.

Currently I am planning an ethnographic project for mapping practices of gesturing, attending and shifting attention, putting-into-words and putting-into-question by Utrecht primatologists as technics of sensitization. I am also interested in the operations of the modes of politics and economics in their postfeminist practices, since this little discipline is a rather powerful supplier of general ideas for human politics and economics.