I am a visual anthropologist, ethnic Hungarian born in Romania and based in the Netherlands.
I am an assistant professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Previously I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC funded project Security Vision: the algorithmic security politics of computer vision at Leiden University, Institute of Political Science, led by Francesco Ragazzi. This project investigated the theoretical, empirical and political implications of the use of computer vision in the field of security.
In my current research I study image recognition technologies, following them from computer science labs where they are developed, into their deployment sites such as automated face recognition technologies used at borders or smart CCTVs employed in public spaces. In this research I use visual ethnography to situate image recognition algorithms in the complex practices from which they emerge and, by doing so, to effectively explore the politics they articulate.
Vision pertains not only to human actors, but is increasingly distributed across devices, networks, data infrastructures and algorithms. To understand this complexity, I propose to expand human vision by ethnographically attending to its relationality and entanglements. I employ a cross-modal approach to vision as to challenge the separation of human from the nonhuman and to move beyond the panoptic visualizations that dominate the scholarship on securitization. I am also interested in a novel conceptualization of vision that goes beyond the human/technology or high-tech/low-tech distinction.
Background
I studied anthropology and cultural studies in Romania and Hungary, later graduating in Visual Ethnography at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
My PhD research conducted at the University of Amsterdam as part of the RaceFaceID Project led by Amade M’charek, investigated how visual technologies in governance enact certain groups of people as “racial others” in Europe. In this research I was especially interested in what it means to “visually recognise” somebody as being Dutch, non-Dutch, Mediterranean, refugee, East European, Roma, or Hungarian. How do we see it? And what exactly are we looking at? During my PhD research, I expanded this question to state practices of identifying citizens and surveilling their movement. In my multimodal dissertation, I argue that racialisation happens not only at the level of the body, when differences are ascribed onto phenotypic characteristics, but also at the level of materials and technologies used in governance and policing.
As a visual anthropologist, I was also curious about how vision occurs, whether in a mundane setting, as part of professional practices, or on a cinema screen. Therefore, I not only wrote about how racial otherness is enacted in situated practices of governance, but I also showed it. In this research, I utilised experimental montage as a generative method to interrupt and complicate scientific narratives about identification and to make a theoretical intervention into the materiality and politics of race.
In using creative and artistic methods in social science research, I have always been committed to collaborating with research participants and making interventions that are not only socially and politically engaged but can also speak to a variety of audiences.
