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In Uncategorized, Voices Startseite

gd:c voices part II: virtuous epistemic circles

How does your research shape the focus, and how is it shaped by the focus?

SQ: Temporality is not just an aspect of my research; it is the central object of my inquiry. In my current postdoctoral project I use trees to examine how modern societies have understood, measured and imagined time and history. Trees preserve material traces of past climates and human interventions, and they often outlive the people who study, manage and exploit them. Because they embody multiple temporal scales – biological, environmental and historical – trees reveal much about modern ideas of temporality as a constitutive feature of modernity itself.

Tree rings reflect growth and age (Photo: Susanne Quitmann)

My research focuses on the emergence of dendrochronology — the science of analysing tree-rings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, Germany and Sweden. Rather than writing a disciplinary history of dendrochronology as a scientific field, however, I examine how humans’ interactions with trees shaped thinking about natural, historical and social time. I am especially interested in how scientific practices, environmental knowledge and material encounters with trees cast new temporal frameworks and scales.

Wood samples at the Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Tring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona)

Engaging with temporalities as a research focus here at gd:c has provided a conceptual framework for approaching this history and linking it to larger questions of globalisation. Time was not a single, shared, homogenous framework; it was produced unevenly through processes of movement, exchange, circulation and rupture. Drawing on both my work on dendrochronology and my earlier research on British child migrants, and in dialogue with my colleagues at gd:c, I am developing the concept of temporal dis:connectivity as a shared analytical framework for the research focus. I hope that this concept will give researchers a shared way of thinking about temporalities along the lines of global dis:connectivity and a lasting, common language to talk about it. At the same time, our research focusses aren’t hermetically sealed. For example, I am interested in laboratories in the history of dendrochronology as sites where temporal knowledge was produced, stabilised and contested. I also welcome the opportunity to further develop the concept of temporal dis:connectivity in relation to cultural infrastructures, where time becomes a resource and where different temporal regimes intersect. AG: As an art and fashion historian, my work reveals how cultural production was structured and sustained through infrastructural frameworks and design strategies. The cultural infrastructure of the fashion system encompasses ateliers and factories for production; magazines, exhibitions, fairs and fashion shows for dissemination; and stores, markets and social media for consumption. In my current research, cultural infrastructure goes beyond spaces and events to include networks of designers and manufacturers. Particularly from the early 20th century, they were organised through various national and international associations, shaped by alliances, dependencies, connections and disconnections.  As Yuniya Kawamura has argued in Fashion-ology, designers are key figures in the production of fashion; they personify fashion, and their designs objectify fashion. I would add that the centralisation of fashion production and its associated politics become evident through the designers’ strategies, which include their own infrastructure: the concept, making and presentation of a collection at a specific venue. In addition to these artistic practices, design strategies also involve entrepreneurial ventures to establish their work globally through cultural infrastructure.

US Vogue, March 15, 1953, Photo: © Vogue Archive, Condé Nast (March 15 1953 | Vogue)

Since the early 2000s, designer councils and fashion shows outside the traditional fashion capitals (Paris, New York, London, Milan) have sought to decentralise the global fashion system and disrupt its hierarchical and Eurocentric structures. Fashion weeks in cities like Jakarta and Dakar provide alternative platforms for local designers and textile traditions.  I am examining the roots of these national fashion policies, which aimed to strengthen regional economies, enhance prestige for local and indigenous craftsmanship, and export cultural heritage worldwide. Which artistic, commercial and industrial infrastructures helped to promote national design in the 20th century? Which transnational parallels run through the strategies and motivations of different fashion institutes? How and why were these institutions and associations supported by the government? https://youtu.be/TC9gGBwISUw In the postwar period, I am especially interested in fashion (re)presentations at international events such as the Olympic Games and world's fairs. They played an important role in framing how cultures, including dress practices, are aestheticised and made legible to global audiences. Designers mobilized dresses as symbols of (national) identity to inspire their designs, without considering the risk of cultural appropriation when elements are extracted, commodified and detached from their original cultural context. I am focusing on these strategies of global visibility and export alongside the institutional promotion of national fashion through institutes, associations and individual designers.

A German fashion magazine promoting what they called 'Mexican' fashion, inspired by the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City (Photo: Aliena Guggenberger)

CF: My research has long focused on experimental spaces at the fault line between the planetary and the global. Working at the intersection of architectural and environmental history, I study how built environments and infrastructures — laboratories, observatories and simulation facilities — mediate planetary processes such as seismic wave propagation, atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, soil formation and the limits of life in extreme environments, rendering them globally legible. Whether examining geophysical observatories around 1900 (see my Planetary Disequilibrium), or, more recently, planetary analogues, I ask how these processes are translated into architectural form, experimental protocol, and infrastructures of knowledge, and what kinds of dis:connections emerge in that translation.

ESA-DLR LUNA - Moon analogue, Cologne, Germany. (above) Rehearsal - simulated moonwalk at the LUNA facilities as preparation for future lunar surface operations. Photo: © ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler. / (below) Virtual reality (VR) model of LUNA’s main hall containing the regolith test bed area with dust chamber visible. Image: © ESA/DLR-F. Saling.

This perspective also shapes my approach to the laboratories of dis:connectivity research focus here at gd:c. Rather than treating laboratories as bounded, local sites, I see them as mediating environments where abstract models of our planet assemble global relations. Laboratories extract signals, samples and processes from particular environments and render them comparable across distance and scale. In doing so, they connect the world through shared standards, models and datasets, while simultaneously disconnecting those abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them.

Concordia Station - planetary analogue, Dome C plateau in Antarctica. Operated jointly by the French Polar Institute IPEV and the Italian Antarctic Programme PNRA. Photo: © ESA/IPEV/PNRA-J. Lacrampe/N. Purvis.

These questions are at the centre of my current research project on planetary analogues. The project examines analogue environments — Antarctic research stations, lunar and Martian simulation facilities, underwater habitats and extreme desert sites — where Earth itself is reconfigured to stand in for other planets or future worlds. I approach these sites as laboratories of dis:connectivity: spaces that make planetary conditions actionable within global scientific, political, and technological regimes by selectively isolating variables, staging rehearsals and projecting futures, while unevenly displacing risk, labour and environmental exposure. 
NASA JETT test series, San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, May 2024. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team develops, integrates, and executes human-in-the-loop tests and analog missions. Drone footage of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Doublas. Video: jsc2025m000255 © NASA/JSC.
Thinking through the gd:c research focus has sharpened my view of these analogue sites. Approaching laboratories through dis:connectivity unearths the tension between the planetary and the global. The planetary refers to processes that exceed human scale and control, while the global names the infrastructures and institutions through which those processes are stabilised, managed and governed. Planetary analogues, understood as laboratories, sit precisely in between. They translate planetary uncertainty into global regimes of knowledge and governance, often producing new asymmetries while promising preparedness and resilience.

Digital plants laboratory showcasing global dis:connections. Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona, 2025, Information Plus Conference at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge. (Images courtesy of the artists.)

In this reciprocal way, my research shapes the research focus as a shared space of inquiry, always in dialogue with our fellows’ projects, each coming from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The research focus likewise continues to sharpen my understanding of laboratories as sites where the planetary and the global rarely align seamlessly, but instead meet through friction, negotiation and experimentation. This is what makes laboratories such fertile ground for research at gd:c. Continue Reading
25 February 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog

gd:c voices part II: virtuous epistemic circles

[Editor's note: this post continues the interview with our postdocs that we began last month.]  

How does your research shape the focus, and how is it shaped by the focus?

SQ: Temporality is not just an aspect of my research; it is the central object of my inquiry. In my current postdoctoral project I use trees to examine how modern societies have understood, measured and imagined time and history. Trees preserve material traces of past climates and human interventions, and they often outlive the people who study, manage and exploit them. Because they embody multiple temporal scales – biological, environmental and historical – trees reveal much about modern ideas of temporality as a constitutive feature of modernity itself.

Tree rings reflect growth and age (Photo: Susanne Quitmann)

My research focuses on the emergence of dendrochronology — the science of analysing tree-rings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, Germany and Sweden. Rather than writing a disciplinary history of dendrochronology as a scientific field, however, I examine how humans’ interactions with trees shaped thinking about natural, historical and social time. I am especially interested in how scientific practices, environmental knowledge and material encounters with trees cast new temporal frameworks and scales.

Wood samples at the Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Tring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona)

Engaging with temporalities as a research focus here at gd:c has provided a conceptual framework for approaching this history and linking it to larger questions of globalisation. Time was not a single, shared, homogenous framework; it was produced unevenly through processes of movement, exchange, circulation and rupture. Drawing on both my work on dendrochronology and my earlier research on British child migrants, and in dialogue with my colleagues at gd:c, I am developing the concept of temporal dis:connectivity as a shared analytical framework for the research focus. I hope that this concept will give researchers a shared way of thinking about temporalities along the lines of global dis:connectivity and a lasting, common language to talk about it. At the same time, our research focusses aren’t hermetically sealed. For example, I am interested in laboratories in the history of dendrochronology as sites where temporal knowledge was produced, stabilised and contested. I also welcome the opportunity to further develop the concept of temporal dis:connectivity in relation to cultural infrastructures, where time becomes a resource and where different temporal regimes intersect. AG: As an art and fashion historian, my work reveals how cultural production was structured and sustained through infrastructural frameworks and design strategies. The cultural infrastructure of the fashion system encompasses ateliers and factories for production; magazines, exhibitions, fairs and fashion shows for dissemination; and stores, markets and social media for consumption. In my current research, cultural infrastructure goes beyond spaces and events to include networks of designers and manufacturers. Particularly from the early 20th century, they were organised through various national and international associations, shaped by alliances, dependencies, connections and disconnections.  As Yuniya Kawamura has argued in Fashion-ology, designers are key figures in the production of fashion; they personify fashion, and their designs objectify fashion. I would add that the centralisation of fashion production and its associated politics become evident through the designers’ strategies, which include their own infrastructure: the concept, making and presentation of a collection at a specific venue. In addition to these artistic practices, design strategies also involve entrepreneurial ventures to establish their work globally through cultural infrastructure.

US Vogue, March 15, 1953, Photo: © Vogue Archive, Condé Nast (March 15 1953 | Vogue)

Since the early 2000s, designer councils and fashion shows outside the traditional fashion capitals (Paris, New York, London, Milan) have sought to decentralise the global fashion system and disrupt its hierarchical and Eurocentric structures. Fashion weeks in cities like Jakarta and Dakar provide alternative platforms for local designers and textile traditions.  I am examining the roots of these national fashion policies, which aimed to strengthen regional economies, enhance prestige for local and indigenous craftsmanship, and export cultural heritage worldwide. Which artistic, commercial and industrial infrastructures helped to promote national design in the 20th century? Which transnational parallels run through the strategies and motivations of different fashion institutes? How and why were these institutions and associations supported by the government? https://youtu.be/TC9gGBwISUw In the postwar period, I am especially interested in fashion (re)presentations at international events such as the Olympic Games and world's fairs. They played an important role in framing how cultures, including dress practices, are aestheticised and made legible to global audiences. Designers mobilized dresses as symbols of (national) identity to inspire their designs, without considering the risk of cultural appropriation when elements are extracted, commodified and detached from their original cultural context. I am focusing on these strategies of global visibility and export alongside the institutional promotion of national fashion through institutes, associations and individual designers.

A German fashion magazine promoting what they called 'Mexican' fashion, inspired by the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City (Photo: Aliena Guggenberger)

CF: My research has long focused on experimental spaces at the fault line between the planetary and the global. Working at the intersection of architectural and environmental history, I study how built environments and infrastructures — laboratories, observatories and simulation facilities — mediate planetary processes such as seismic wave propagation, atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, soil formation and the limits of life in extreme environments, rendering them globally legible. Whether examining geophysical observatories around 1900 (see my Planetary Disequilibrium), or, more recently, planetary analogues, I ask how these processes are translated into architectural form, experimental protocol, and infrastructures of knowledge, and what kinds of dis:connections emerge in that translation.

ESA-DLR LUNA - Moon analogue, Cologne, Germany. (above) Rehearsal - simulated moonwalk at the LUNA facilities as preparation for future lunar surface operations. Photo: © ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler. / (below) Virtual reality (VR) model of LUNA’s main hall containing the regolith test bed area with dust chamber visible. Image: © ESA/DLR-F. Saling.

  This perspective also shapes my approach to the laboratories of dis:connectivity research focus here at gd:c. Rather than treating laboratories as bounded, local sites, I see them as mediating environments where abstract models of our planet assemble global relations. Laboratories extract signals, samples and processes from particular environments and render them comparable across distance and scale. In doing so, they connect the world through shared standards, models and datasets, while simultaneously disconnecting those abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them.

Concordia Station - planetary analogue, Dome C plateau in Antarctica. Operated jointly by the French Polar Institute IPEV and the Italian Antarctic Programme PNRA. Photo: © ESA/IPEV/PNRA-J. Lacrampe/N. Purvis.

These questions are at the centre of my current research project on planetary analogues. The project examines analogue environments — Antarctic research stations, lunar and Martian simulation facilities, underwater habitats and extreme desert sites — where Earth itself is reconfigured to stand in for other planets or future worlds. I approach these sites as laboratories of dis:connectivity: spaces that make planetary conditions actionable within global scientific, political, and technological regimes by selectively isolating variables, staging rehearsals and projecting futures, while unevenly displacing risk, labour and environmental exposure. 
NASA JETT test series, San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, May 2024. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team develops, integrates, and executes human-in-the-loop tests and analog missions. Drone footage of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Doublas. Video: jsc2025m000255 © NASA/JSC.
Thinking through the gd:c research focus has sharpened my view of these analogue sites. Approaching laboratories through dis:connectivity unearths the tension between the planetary and the global. The planetary refers to processes that exceed human scale and control, while the global names the infrastructures and institutions through which those processes are stabilised, managed and governed. Planetary analogues, understood as laboratories, sit precisely in between. They translate planetary uncertainty into global regimes of knowledge and governance, often producing new asymmetries while promising preparedness and resilience.

Digital plants laboratory showcasing global dis:connections. Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona, 2025, Information Plus Conference at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge. (Images courtesy of the artists.)

  In this reciprocal way, my research shapes the research focus as a shared space of inquiry, always in dialogue with our fellows’ projects, each coming from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The research focus likewise continues to sharpen my understanding of laboratories as sites where the planetary and the global rarely align seamlessly, but instead meet through friction, negotiation and experimentation. This is what makes laboratories such fertile ground for research at gd:c. Continue Reading
17 February 2026