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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Operative TV: Audiovisual Closed-Circuits from the Military to the Classroom, 1930s-1990s

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

From video surveillance to online teaching, from drone warfare, highway management to telemedicine: closed-circuit images take up multiple spaces today. Despite being quotidian, their history remains largely unknown. Operative TV's goal is to fill this gap by providing the first ever study of audiovisual closed-circuits in the longue durée. It scrutinizes the closed-circuits' diversity between the 1930s and the 1990s and develops case studies from the USA, France, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland - countries crucial for the development of closed-circuits and providing access to resources for writing the history of a medium whose images were conceived as instruments rather than representations.Distributed under Industrial Television and CCTV (for closed-circuit television), the systems were developed in Europe and the USA mainly by enterprises active in televisual R&D (i.e., RCA, Grundig, and many more). In their most basic organization, they connected a camera with a monitor by cable; more sophisticated designs allowed for the video recording of content or bi-directional conversation. While CCTV today stands as a synonym of the surveillance camera, its historical applications were at least as heterogeneous as contemporary closed-circuits and used on factory floors and in nuclear plants, in hospitals and schools. In this study, subproject (SP) 2 focuses on surveillance operations. However, Operative TV also emphasizes televisual practices beyond the surveillance framework and the closed-circuit's embeddedness in multiple institutional spaces. In lieu of using a narrow definition of what I call audiovisual closed-circuits (AVCC), I comprehend AVCC as a flexible and pluriform system: its applicability beyond the surveillance camera paradoxically stems from its closed design. Drawing upon multinational archival research, Operative TV examines two main hypotheses. First, it posits that the analysis of television in industrial, educational, and military contexts cannot be based on habitual analytical categories such as texts or spectators. Instead, AVCC necessitates a methodological shift towards an understanding of audiovisual production as a chain of operations that allows analyzing the entanglement of human and non-human actors. AVCC's usefulness indeed was contingent on the interplay of heterogeneous elements including operators, screens, infrastructures, and images: their interdependence, rather than the isolated components, should form the core of a historical enquiry. Second, Operative TV argues that the history of AVCC, an analog-electronic technology, nourishes a media archaeology of the digital. AVCC emerged at the same moment as digital computers; it coexisted and sometimes converged with digital machines. Before the computer definitively took over factory and office floors, television was used as a tool for operations ranging from targeting to instructing: analyzing AVCC's alleged "universality" (Journal d'Yverdon 1955) allows to better understand the emergence of our digital society. To discuss these two hypotheses, the project introduces an original framework drawing upon recent media theory, and looks more specifically at four operations performed by AVCC (SP 1 to 4). In addition to the operation of surveilling (SP 2), targeting (SP 1) was a central - and first - function of closed-circuits from the 1930s on; automating the workplace and instructing students (SP 3 & 4) were other tasks performed by AVCC in the postwar years. Sustained by complex human-machines ecologies, these operations would rapidly be executed by digital computers: before their digitization, they were the realm of analog TV.

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Improving the visibility of Equatorial Guinea as a Spanish-speaking country

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Background: Equatorial Guinea presents an exceptional research field within the studies of the Spanish language. Geographically located in southern Africa, on the equator, in the Gulf of Guinea, it is today the only Hispanophone country in Africa (except for the politically sensitive case of Western Sahara) and thus offers a completely unique view of the world language Spanish, complementary to Europe and America. Despite this outstanding position, Equatorial Guinea still occupies a marginal status in studies on the dialectology, history, sociolinguistics and language contacts of Spanish. Although some important authors in the field of Spanish linguistics, such as De Granda, Quilis, Casado-Fresnillo or Lipski, have dedicated part of their work to Equatorial Guinea, modern publications are rare, which is why knowledge of the Equatoguinean variety of Spanish is still fragmentary. Its invisibility in studies about Spanish is intensified by a widespread lack of knowledge and consciousness about this only Hispanophone country in southern Africa and a still dominantly European view on African realities based on (post)colonial stereotypes, evaluations and hierarchizations. In fact, the general knowledge about Equatorial Guinea within the Spanish-speaking world is very incomplete, which is particularly surprising in the case of Spain, since Equatorial Guinea only gained its independence from Spain just over 50 years ago (1968).


Overall aim of the project: This research project aims at filling the existing research gap about Equatorial Guinea and at improving its visibility as part of the global Hispanophone world. Modern research data will be provided and critical questions answered, to show its relevance for Hispanic studies and to overcome traditional images about Equatorial Guinea and its Spanish, often perceived as a "peripheric", "incomplete", "incorrect", "exceptional" or "non-standard" variety.


Objectives, methods and expected results: The main part of this research project focuses on dialectological and sociolinguistic data collection in Equatorial Guinea (both on the island of Bioko and on mainland Río Muni). Its objective is to generate modern dialectological and sociolinguistic descriptions of Spanish in Equatorial Guinea through the collection and analysis of sociolinguistic guideline interviews and linguistic tests and questionnaires. The interview transcripts will constitute the first modern and digital corpus of spoken Equatoguinean Spanish. Sociolinguistic analyses on language perception, attitudes and ideologies will be possible; and the digital analyses of specific linguistic features combined with the results from the tests and questionnaires will allow to elaborate modern dialectological descriptions on different linguistic levels. Classical summaries about Equatoguinean Spanish in linguistic manuals can be revised and completed, and an answer can be given to the important question about the internal (diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, ethnic) homogeneity or diversity of Equatoguinean Spanish. Furthermore, this Equatoguinean corpus can be compared with existing interviews with Equatoguineans in Madrid, Spain (habilitation project S. Schlumpf-Thurnherr).


Impact: The proposed project offers multiple and diverse views on Equatorial Guinea, raises awareness about its importance within the linguistic research community and in Equatorial Guinea itself, and contributes considerably to the knowledge about and the visibilization of this unique Hispanophone country in Africa.

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Religionsproduktive Bilddiskurse. Kontinuität und Innovation der Denkfigur des Gottes im neopaganen Hexentum

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Das Projekt untersucht Kontinuitäten, Unterbrüche und Neubesetzungen im semantischen Feld und in der Bildimagination rund um die Denkfigur des männlichen Gottes im neopaganen Hexentum. Ausgehend von den Vernetzungen zwischen der Religionsforschung und esoterischen, religionsproduktiven Strömungen im ausgehenden 19. Jh. und zu Beginn des 20. Jh., welche den Hintergrund für die Gründung des Wicca als moderne Hexenreligion durch Gerald Gardner beginnend 1946 darstellen, sollen grundlegende Elemente des männlichen Gottes festgehalten werden. Anhand dieses Idealtypes können die weiteren Entwicklungen dieses Gottes nachgezeichnet und eingeordnet werden. Sowohl Kontinuität wie auch Innovation in der Figur bedienen sich der Legitimationsstrategie des Rückverweises und der Genealogie. Selbst die Ablehnung von Motiven oder Gedanken, welche Gardner festsetzte, werden in Verweis auf ihn diskutiert und abgelehnt. Neu gebildete Assoziationslinien werden genealogisch verankert und werden so Teil einer ständig dynamisch bleibenden Idee von Religionsgeschichte und Religion an sich. In einem ersten Teil wird dem genannten Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Religion im Vorfeld der Gründung des Wicca nachgegangen. Diese Verstrickungen werden auch exemplarisch an ausgewählten Figuren in den Bruchstellen zwischen Esoterik, Druidentum und Wicca, Folkloreforschung, Altertumswissenschaften sowie Literatur und Religionsproduktion aufgezeigt. Trotz der heterogenen Gemengelage sind die Ideen und Motive, welche das breite Feld des 'Hexen-Gottes' ausmachen bereits lesbar. An drei emischen Texten zur paganen Gottesfigur, seiner Geschichte, Bedeutung und Verehrung sollen verschiedene Fragen untersucht werden: Die Frage nach einer direkten Kontinuität im Sinne der unveränderten Weiterführung von Motiven; die Frage nach der Kontinuität der darunterliegenden Rechtfertigung von Motiven; zuletzt muss auch nach der Assoziationslogik oder Rechtfertigung neuer Motive oder Interpretationen zum Gott gefragt werden. Dieser dritte Teil widmet sich den Texten "Masks of Misrule. The Horned God and his Cult in Europe" (1996) von Nigel Jackson, "Dionysos. Exciter to Frenzy" (2013) von der Priesterin und Autorin Vikki Bramshaw und aus dem Jahr 2021 "The Horned God oft he Witches" von Jason Mankey. Zur kohärenten Diskussion der Entwicklung einer Gottesfigur mit damit in Verbindung stehenden Objekten, Eigenschaften, Narrativen, Körperlichkeiten und Landschaften muss ein erweiterter Figurenbegriff mit Einbezug von Text und Bild als Instrument dienen. Dazu wird Auerbachs Begriff der Figura und Figuration hin zu Dispositiv und schliesslich Denkfigur weitergeführt. In diesem Sinne wird die Denkfigur als genauso relevant und anwendbar in der Bildwissenschaft wie in der Literaturwissenschaft postuliert.

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Inherited Futures? Objects, Time, Knowledge

Research Project  | 5 Project Members

The interdisciplinary project Inherited Futures? Objects, Time, Knowledge investigates inheritance as a process of passing down objects to reproduce collectives and institutions into the future. It does so against the backdrop of an historical paradox: between growing investments in inheritance predicated on liberal conceptions of political subjecthood, genealogical continuity, and durable attachments to land, territory, and identity on the one hand, and an increasing sense of futures displaced and threatened by climate change, technological transformation, the fragility of the global political order, and large-scale migration on the other hand. The project draws on rich anthropological and historical studies of inheritance as a social practice, and the norms, institutions and values that shape the transmission of property, resources, rights, and obligations across generations. Likewise, it builds on how anthropologists and historians have attended to the ways in which individuals and societies orient themselves towards, desire and imagine futures, and explained under which conditions the making of futures is put into question, suspended, or undermined. Consolidating these perspectives, the project ties inheriting and futuring together, and turns towards the problem of time and temporality by way of understanding struggles over inherited things as struggles over epochal ruptures, moments of crisis, (re)orientation in space and time, and being and becoming. Our concern with these dynamics informs the project’s main research interest, methods, and outcomes. The research foregrounds objects, understood as knots of social practice and social knowledge, in order to shed light on the complexities of ‘inherited futures’ across social terrains, temporalities, cultural imaginaries, epistemologies, scales of inquiry and affective economies. The studies proposed illuminate multiple ways of paying attention to things - highlighting the social life of objects and their embeddedness in social relations and practice, and acknowledging the ways in which individuals and societies care for, reconstitute, and reimagine what they inherit. Grounded in ethnographic and archival research in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, and negotiating approaches from anthropology, history and African Studies, the project pursues a strategy of thinking across disciplinary, epistemological, historical, and cultural spaces to decenter established modes of knowledge production and interrogate inherited paradigms of regional boundedness in order to attend to the shifting material grounds of subjectivity, belonging and historical imagination.


The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 219800), hosted by the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel.

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Responsible Digital Society

Research Networks of the University of Basel  | 8 Project Members

In den letzten Jahren hat die digitale Transformation zu massiven Veränderungen geführt. Die Anwendung von maschinellem Lernen zur Datenanalyse treibt die wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse in rasantem Tempo voran, liefert Lösungen für lange bestehende Probleme und führt zu neuen Erkenntnissen, die noch vor kurzer Zeit unvorstellbar schienen. Im Gegensatz dazu scheint der kritische Diskurs in der Gesellschaft den rasanten technologischen Veränderungen hinterherzuhinken. Angesichts der grossen Breite an Anwendungen ist es entscheidend, einen begleitenden interdisziplinären Diskurs zu gesellschaftlichen, rechtlichen, ethischen, psychologischen, politischen und ökonomischen Folgen zu führen, um den verantwortungsvollen Einsatz neuartiger Methoden in all diesen verschiedenen Bereichen zu begleiten und Chancen und Risiken zu identifizieren. Eine moderne digitale Gesellschaft sollte in der Lage sein, diese neuen Technologien angemessen, aber auch kritisch und verantwortungsvoll zu nutzen. Das Ziel des Forschungsnetzwerks Responsible Digital Society ist es, eine Plattform für einen kritischen, interdisziplinären und proaktiven Diskurs zu allen Aspekten der digitalen Transformation innerhalb der Universität und darüber hinaus zu schaffen und den wissenschaftlichen Austausch über Methoden der künstlichen Intelligenz und datengetriebenen Forschung (Data Science) und deren Anwendung zu unterstützen.

Am Forschungsnetzwerk sind Forschende der Philosophisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen, Philosophisch-Historischen, Juristischen, Medizinischen, Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen, Theologischen Fakultät und der Fakultät für Psychologie sowie Forschende des Universitätsspitals Basel beteiligt.


In recent years, the digital transformation has led to massive changes. The application of deep learning-based approaches to data analysis is advancing scientific knowledge at a rapid pace, providing solutions to long-standing problems and leading to new insights that seemed unimaginable only a short time ago. In contrast, critical discourse in the society seems to be lagging behind the rapid technological changes. Given the pervasiveness of the applications, it is crucial to conduct an accompanying interdisciplinary discussion at the societal, legal, ethical, psychological, political, and economic levels, to guide the responsible application of novel methods in all these various areas, and to identify opportunities and risks. A modern digital society should be able to use these new technologies in an opportune, yet critical and responsible way. The goal of the Responsible Digital Society research network is to create a platform for a critical, interdisciplinary, and proactive discourse on all aspects of digital transformation within the university and beyond and to support the scientific exchange on methods of artificial intelligence and data-driven research (Data Science) and their application.

The research network involves researchers from the Faculties of Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Law, Medicine, Economics, Theology, and Psychology at the University of Basel, as well as researchers from the University Hospital Basel.