Monika Halkort is a researcher and lecturer with a PhD in Sociology from Queens University, UK. Within the program she is a key contributor to the curriculum and workshop design on issues of sustainability, migration, capitalism and human rights, and will be teaching on these topics herself.

Monika has worked extensively on questions of refugees, migrants and stateless populations in the Mediterranean and the Arab region from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together political ecology, feminist STS, and decolonial thought.  Following her PhD thesis on the political and moral ecology of data activism in Palestinian Refugee camps in Lebanon, her more recent work discusses the ways political and ethical commitments towards migrants and refugees are currently renegotiated and re-configured, as real time tracking devices, environmental sensors and Earth observation systems, fundamentally alter our ways of seeing and engaging with human and non-human others across timeframes and scales. The main objective of this research is to reveal new patterns of racialization and erasure at the intersection of social, biological and machine intelligences and to assess how they recalibrate ‘zones of non-being’ that Franz Fanon famously identified as key locus of oppression, de-humanisation and ontological displacement in modern coloniality.

Prior to her involvement in the Applied Human Rights program Monika held a position as Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Social Communication at the Lebanese American University in Beirut (2013 – 2020). Next to her regular teaching and research activities she contributed to several artistic research platforms, including the Home Works Academy at the Lebanese Art Foundation, Ashkal Alwan, Sharjah Biennale, the Digital Earth Symposium, the School of Dance and Circus (DOCH) at Stockholm University, Tanzquartier Wien and the Ocean Academy of TBA 21,  Vienna.

Next to her academic work Monika is a regular contributor to the Ö1 programs ‘Radiokolleg’ and ‘Diagonal’, where she translates her general research interests into more accessible media formats, producing radio documentaries, interviews and features on science, culture, geo-politics and the arts. Her academic work is published in peer reviewed books and journals such as the International Journal for Communication, The Canadian Journal of Communication, and Tecnoscienza.

Examples of her work can be found here: https://dieangewandte.academia.edu/MonikaHalkort