Henriette Gunkel is professor for the transformation of audiovisual media with a specific focus on gender and queer theory at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her research interests are Visual Cultures and Aesthetics, Gender and Queer Theory, Post- and Decolonial Thought, Black Studies, Memory Studies and Mediated Landscapes, Infrastructure Studies, Extractivism, Speculative Fiction, Afrofuturism.
MIASA Project: What Remains: Spectral Infrastructures of Extraction
The research project, anchored in media studies, aims to investigate what remains of colonial
extractive infrastructures. It asks what the remains reveal about the history of colonial violence and how the ‘legacy’ of that violence persists today and continues to shape the infrastructures of transnational extraction economies of the future, be that, mining the ocean floor or facilitating Europe’s “green transition”. This research project is particularly concerned with spectral elements that exist at the threshold of perception in the context of Namibia where the history of German colonial extractive infrastructure has left traces in different parts of the landscape. By attuning to these colonial remains and sites, particularly to those related to the oceanic, this project aims to explore their histories and scales of environmental destructions and explore artistic and community-based interventions which open possibilities for more sustainable extractive practices in the future while acknowledging the violence of the past.
Selected publications
Her most important publications include the co-edited volumes Futures & Fictions (Repeater 2017, together with Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan) and We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions (Transcript 2019, together with kara lynch) as well as the co-authored book Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg 2021, together with Ayesha Hameed).
On the topic of colonial infrastructures and mediated landscapes, she has published the following (selection of three):
Gunkel H. (2023) „Sand, Atmosphere, Memorialization: Some Reflections on the Remains of German Colonial Extraction in Namibia’s Desert“, in: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 (2023), https://insert.art/ausgaben/dis-sense/sand-atmospherememorialization/.
Gunkel H. (2023) „Was Bleibt: Spektrale Infrastrukturen der kolonialen Extraktion im Kontext Namibias“,in: Sprache und Literatur (Paderborn) 127 (2023/1), S. 49–69.
Gunkel, Henriette (2021). ‘Codes, Raster, Technologien queerer Erinnerungslandschaften. Charlotte Prodgers SaF05.’ In: A. Deuber-Mankowsky, P. Hanke (eds.) Queeres Kino. Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentation des Prekären. Berlin: ICI Berlin Press,
