Listening to Breakdown: Infrastructural Disruption and the Public Perception of Danger in Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (1980–2000)

During the 1980s and 1990s, Peru experienced the most violent period in its republican history. Amid political violence, media control, territorial fragmentation, and fragile communication channels, infrastructure became a key site of struggle between insurgent groups and state forces. Blackouts, bombings, radio sabotage, curfews, and transmission failures became signs of threat, and of shifting control and contested authority, altering what civilians could hear and know in everyday life.

The project asks how disruptions to electricity, radio, and telecommunications reshaped the auditory and social conditions through which danger became perceptible, inferable, and communicable. Drawing on press and human rights archives, emergency regulations, and contextual interviews, it traces infrastructural disruption across Lima, Ayacucho, and Puno, comparing the distinct media ecologies of these regions. It argues that listening can be understood as an inferential practice for navigating semantic uncertainty, assessing threat, and making sense of shifting forms of vulnerability and control.

Alejandra holds a BSc and an MA in Philosophy from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Alongside her academic work, she develops an artistic practice focused on listening and obsolete telecommunication systems.

Epistemologies of Alienation: Detours of Gestalt Theory through Exile and Resistance (1930–1960)

The research investigates how experiences of displacement and alienation reshaped psychological knowledge, while simultaneously examining Gestalt theory as an epistemic resource that transformed institutional, political, and technological practices.

While the emergence of the Berlin School and its continuation in the United States have been studied, its political detours within Europe—from laboratories to networks of resistance—remain largely unexplored. By comparing the work of psychologist Werner Wolff and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, Felix argues that Gestalt theory’s expulsion in 1933 marked a radical transformation of its knowledge and application. These epistemic shifts were inseparable from the conditions of exile and alienation, and unfolded in dialogue with contemporary media practices.

Drawing on approaches from the history of knowledge, critical psychiatry, and media studies, the project reconstructs a neglected chapter in the political history of psychology. The research is based on archival work conducted in Europe and the United States.

Felix holds an MA in Media Studies from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, for which he received the 2025 University Prize. Before joining the IMPRS, he was a fellow of the Thüringer Graduiertenförderung and worked with several research groups.

Flexibilization through Work from Home? History of Telework in (West) Germany and France, 1960–present

This project analyzes the history of telework in France and West-Germany within the broader context of the flexibilization of labor regimes in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines the knowledge and technologies that shaped, produced, and constructed human labor as a resource. The project brings together studies of labor and intersectionality with recent insights from digital and computing history to explore how digitalization shaped global and local labor regimes in the late twentieth century.

Tjark Nentwig holds an BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology and an MA in the History of Science, Technology and the Environment from the Technische Universität Berlin. His MA thesis explored the political and software history of West-German Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s.

Publications & Presentations

_{Selected Bibliography}

_{Nentwig, Tjark. “Computerlandschaften – Literaturessay zur Geschichte computergestützter Umweltbeziehungen.” In Umwelt – Technik – Wissen: Verflechtungen vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute, edited by F. Zimmer et al. Umwelt- und Klimageschichte. Transcript, 2025. >link}

_{Nentwig, Tjark. “Revolution als Werbegag: Es kam doch anders als man dachte,” Kultur & Technik 32, no. 3 (2025): 34–38.}

_{Nentwig, Tjark and Kathrin Tschida. “Ausgebügelt? Leichtigkeit als Fortschrittsversprechen,” Mensch! Technik. Das Magazin des Deutschen Technikmuseums und seiner Freunde und Förderer, vol. 1/24. Museen Bauen. Deutsches Technikmuseum, 2024. >link}

 

_{Selected Presentations}

_{July 2026: “Quo vadis, Computer? (Geschlechter-)Politik und Informatik an der TU Berlin 1970–1990.” Ringvorlesung, Wissenschaft in bewegten Zeiten – 80 Jahre TU Berlin. TU Berlin.}

_{July 2025: “Computing Landscapes – Sketching an Information History of the Environment.” Workshop Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Digital Transformation, Deutsches Museum München.}

Experiments Under Pressure: Chinese Materia Medica and the Making of Modern Pharmacology in China, 1920s–1970s

How did Chinese scientists trained in chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine select, prepare, and test natural substances long used in clinical practice? Situating these experimental practices across Republican China, wartime mobilization, and early socialist state-building and Cold War alliances, the project explores how war and revolution created conditions of pressure that shaped research agendas, experimental standards, and scientific authority. 

Bringing together the history of medicine in modern China with the history of modern pharmacology, this project conceptualizes pharmacological experimentation as a form of scientific translation grounded in material practices, dependent on infrastructure, and shaped by historically contingencies.

Yuqi holds a BA in Visual Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University. Her master’s thesis examined the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary China through the lens of clinical labor. Before joining the IMPRS, she spent four years working as a journalist and as a program officer at an NGO in Beijing.