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For me, that means cultural infrastructure plays an active role in constituting our shared knowledge. Places like theatres, museums, libraries, archives and cultural heritage sites support the creation and preservation of artifacts and performances. In their digital expansion, these institutions operate as globally accessible platforms, revealing intersections between various collections, like Google Arts and Culture does. Yet such innovation can also concentrate power and restrict/limit access as well, since each institution curates its own content and presents its own narrative.
I like exploring how the immediate geographic locations of cultural infrastructures contextualise their history and how they encourage participation and critical thinking beyond their locations.
SQ: Research on globalisation and global dis:connectivity has mostly focused on spaces and spatial relationships, like laboratories and cultural infrastructures. But time is just as important. Disruptions, absences and detours are as much about space as they are about time. They involve pauses, delays and haste. Time is a central variable in both the natural sciences and the humanities. In the sciences, time is mostly an objective, measurable value. In the humanities, by contrast, time is something people experience and interpret.
Societies, groups and individuals can have different temporalities. Everyone experiences and lives in time, but research tends to overlook it. This began to change with the temporal turn in the humanities and the social sciences in the early 21st century, when researchers started to examine how time operates in areas ranging from the arts to social and environmental history. While some of this work touches on the issue of globalisation, and some studies of globalisation address temporality, the connection between processes of globalisation and temporality is still not fully understood.
CF: I understand laboratories in a broad sense. For me, they include not only scientific research sites but also observatories, field stations, archives, exhibition spaces, simulation environments as well as artistic and design studios. Across these diverse settings, laboratories operate in similar ways: they simplify complexity, translate environments into models and data, and they stage the global as something that can be compared, tested and anticipated.
This is why I see laboratories as a connective hinge between the other research focusses at gd:c. As cultural infrastructures, they organise access, visibility and authority in knowledge production; as temporal devices, they structure anticipation, delay, repetition and projection. Laboratories are often imagined as controlled spaces that are removed from the world they study. Yet from the perspective of globalisation research, I approach them less as enclosed environments than as sites where global relations are assembled, interrupted and reconfigured. This helps me explore them as spaces of dis:connectivity in which elements of the world are temporarily extracted from their contexts, transformed into objects of knowledge and reconnected in new, often asymmetrical ways.
What interests me in particular is how laboratories today increasingly operate as anticipatory sites. In the context of climate change, technological acceleration and planetary transformation, they are where futures are modelled, risks are simulated, and thresholds are crossed.
Studying laboratories as sites of dis:connectivity allows me to situate future-oriented debates in historical analyses of globalisation, tracing how experimental spaces and built environments have always shaped the governance of human and more-than-human futures under conditions of polycrisis and existential risk.
SQ: Our research at gd:c has only just begun to explore the relationship between temporality and global dis:connectivity. However, rereading existing scholarship through the lens of temporality, we see that the connection was there all along. Adding the two concepts of temporal dis:connectivity and dis:connected temporalities can only enrich our investigations. Temporality is central to how we experience globalisation and deglobalisation as well as to public debates about these phenomena, from fast-moving financial markets and disrupted supply chains to migrants waiting in transit and the idea of uneven historical change in different parts of the world.
I am particularly interested in the latter phenomenon: the perception of diverging civilisational temporalities and varying cultural and political references between the present, the past and the future. I would argue that focussing on temporalities in the study of globalisation and dis:connectivity helps us better understand how global dis:connections are made, strained and experienced.
AG: Considering cultural infrastructure as a material framework helps make the highly theorised and complex research on globalisation more tangible to me. Cultural activities and spaces are visible platforms for discussing global narratives, whether they are brought to life on stage, presented loudly in public conversations or, more subtly, documented in books or materialised through exhibits. All these experiences foster critical thinking.
During the COVID-19 pandemic I first truly recognised the importance of cultural infrastructure not only as space for artistic expression, a repository of collective memory, but also as a connector. Debates about whether cultural infrastructure counts as an essential service shook its foundations and challenged its resilience. Ongoing cuts to the budgets of cultural institutions reinforce the injustice in disparate access and participation, forfeiting potential connection and replacing it with greater isolation.
While these micro-fractures may be hard to see, the vulnerability of cultural infrastructure is unmistakable in its symbolic and public positioning. It is exposed to digital threats such as cyberattacks as well as to analogue forms of violence, including the deliberate targeting and destruction of cultural heritage sites in times of war.
In the current political climate, I think it is more essential than ever to promote and practice intercultural dialogue. It is therefore inspiring to see how the diverse approaches at gd:c – scholarly research as well as artists’ perspectives – uncover striking parallels in the study of global and local cultural infrastructure. This shared knowledge encourages a can-do attitude and collaboration, even beyond our time here. Continue Reading
gd:c voices: 3 postdocs – 3 research focusses – 2 questions
Dis:connectivity is at the heart of our work at gd:c. Instead of seeing globalisation as a linear process of increasing integration or fragmentation, dis:connectivity assumes connection and disconnection occur simultaneously through absences, detours and interruptions. Dis:connectivity is not an anomaly of globalisation; it’s what gives globalisation form. After having looked at absences, detours and interruptions across historical periods, regions and disciplines, we’re now turning our attention to cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity. These focusses help us to coordinate our research and to compare our results. They also let all our individual projects speak to one another with a common vocabulary. In this ReFocus mini-series, our three postdocs introduce the three research focusses they coordinate. Aliena Guggenberger, Susanne Quitmann and Clemens Finkelstein each reflect on how their particular focus enriches globalisation research and outline how their own projects and collaborations at gd:c are shaped through cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity.Aliena, Susanne and Clemens (from left to right)
What does your research focus explore?
AG: Infrastructure is commonly understood as a set of economic facilities, such as transportation and communication networks. A cultural perspective emphasises how infrastructure shapes social relations. For example, while airports facilitate physical exchange and connections around the globe, cultural infrastructure enables social interaction through various activities and spaces, including art. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, conceptualises representational spaces (unlike planned or conceived space) as users live in them, experience them and endow them with meaning through images, narratives and embodied practices.Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, MoMA New York 2010 (Image: Andrew Russeth via Wikimedia)
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)
Watching time pass (Image: Susanne Quitmann)
Map of current de facto time zones as of March 2025 (UnaitxuGV, Heitordp and others via Wikimedia)
Laboratory settings across time and practice: (top) Art Lab in the Park by Street Lab, Queens Museum, NYC (2020) - a series of socially-distanced open-air art studio sessions, photo: © Street Lab (CC BY-NC 4.0); (left) An alchemist in his laboratory with his family: to the right they are shown calling at the poorhouse, destitute after the husband's failed experiments. Engraving after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1558. Wellcome Collection 35278i (Public Domain); (right) Quantum Lab - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) (2020). Two-color pulse sequences are generated for spin lifetime and spin coherence measurements in a dilution refrigerator. Photo: © ORNL (CC BY 2.0).
How does your research focus enrich globalisation research and how is the focus related to dis:connectivity?
CF: Seen through the lens of dis:connectivity, I approach laboratories as anything but neutral sites. The experiments they house select and abstract some connections while obscuring others. Knowledge produced in laboratories often circulates globally, while the material, social and ecological consequences of experimentation remain unevenly distributed. This asymmetry is no accident: historically, laboratories have been closely linked to imperial, extractive and modernising projects, while also serving as spaces of critique and alternative world-making.Planetary laboratories and their dis:connected worlds of science, technology and extraction: (left) the Columbus Laboratory module aboard the International Space Station, where experiments abstract planetary processes under microgravity, photo: © NASA; (right) the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine in Western Australia, an extractive landscape whose materials — gold among them, integral to aerospace electronics—circulate into orbital infrastructures, even as the social and ecological costs of extraction remain unevenly grounded, photo: © Calistemon (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Anticipatory laboratories staging speculative futures of dis:connected globalisation beyond Earth. Cylindrical Colonies for a population of over a million (1976). Image: © NASA Ames Research Center / Rick Guidice - AC75-1086.
Renaissance table clock (Image: Susanne Quitmann)
Arriving ship on a pocket watch (Image: Susanne Quitmann)
Design exhibition (Salone des Mobile), Milan (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)
Ruins of a theatre in Mariupol (Image: Lirhan2016 via Wikimedia)
20 January 2026