Franziska Zirker

About

Franziska Zirker conducts research at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and critical security studies. Her research focuses on data technologies used to detect and manage emergencies, such as pandemics, natural disasters, and geopolitical crises. She is particularly interested in the political epistemology of security—the relationship between knowledge production and security strategies.

She is pursuing her Ph.D. at the Collaborative Research Center Dynamics of Security at the University of Marburg and holds an M.A. in Sociology (Frankfurt) as well as B.A.s in Political Science and Social Sciences (Marburg). In her dissertation, she examines how COVID-19 dashboards made the pandemic “knowable” in real time, and analyzes the tension between the desire for immediate, unambiguous information and the inevitable entanglement of data with diverse temporal, spatial, affective, and power politics. Methodologically, she works primarily with situational analysis following Adele Clarke, combined with interviews as well as ethnographic and art-based methods.

During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation at the University of Edinburgh. She is a member of the German Sociological Association’s STS Section, EASST, 4S, and EIAS, and has taught at the Institute of Sociology as well as at the Center for Gender Studies and Feminist Future Studies at the University of Marburg.