GIAS organizes its academic initiatives into five thematic pillars that serve as loci for collaboration and critical exploration:
- Global Governance and International Legal Orders Topics include: plurilateralism, normative fragmentation, global public goods, non-state lawmaking, and post-Westphalian sovereignty. Fellows are encouraged to engage with jurisprudential theory, legal pluralism, and comparative institutional design. Current projects address climate justice litigation, transnational corporate accountability, and algorithmic regulatory regimes.
- Philosophy of Science and Ethics of Innovation Investigates how science is shaped by cultural logics, power structures, and ethical frameworks. Emphasis on scientific revolutions, anticipatory governance, and the moral economy of innovation. Research interfaces with feminist epistemology, indigenous knowledge systems, and the historiography of technoscience.
- Artificial Intelligence, Data Infrastructures, and Society Explores the algorithmic restructuring of knowledge, labor, surveillance, and identity. Topics include AI explainability, data colonialism, platform capitalism, and computational normativity. The program develops normative frameworks for algorithmic accountability and deliberative democratic oversight.
- Climate Change, Ecological Rationality, and Planetary Futures Focus on resilience theory, socio-ecological systems, degrowth paradigms, and just transitions. Projects aim to integrate local knowledge systems with global environmental governance. Research clusters explore post-carbon imaginaries, environmental constitutionalism, and multispecies justice.
- Health, Biopolitics, and Human Development Interdisciplinary focus on health disparities, biotechnologies, global health security, and reproductive justice. The cluster supports cross-sector collaboration between health professionals, ethicists, and legal theorists. It engages with the biopolitical production of illness and care, critical disability studies, and health data justice.
Focus Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
HCI at GIAS is conceptualized not merely as a technical field but as a deeply interdisciplinary domain shaped by design philosophies, legal paradigms, socio-political conditions, and ethical imaginaries.
Key Research Questions:
- What are the epistemological implications of user-centered design?
- How do HCI systems embed, reproduce, or subvert social hierarchies?
- What constitutes ethical UX in institutions where consent, cognition, and care intersect?
- How can participatory design methodologies foster algorithmic justice?
Methodologies span ethnographic interface studies, critical code analysis, normative legal inquiry, experimental design prototyping, and participatory action research.
HCI researchers at GIAS also explore the ontological implications of machine agency, the aesthetics of digital embodiment, the neurodiversity of interaction patterns, and the affective economies of smart interfaces. Collaborative labs develop prototypical civic technologies that address disinformation, bureaucratic opacity, and social stigma in algorithmic systems.