Memo+3+–+Biosketch+–+LM+Bachinger

Age 44 January 29, 2033
 * Leo Matteo Bachinger **

So, I am 44 today. So what happened in my academic life so far?

I am now living in Vienna, Austria, and I am a strange hybrid of academic, researcher, and advocate.

I work as external consultant mostly for state and international agencies, such as the UN, although my immediate institutional affiliation is with an extra-universitarian research institute that is funded by the Austrian state as independent research unit. We work on larger questions of the politics of technology, focused of grass-root civic engagement. Particularly we build on (and further re-appropriate and re-conceptualize) a specific theoretical concept of care that was developed in my thesis and further-on in collaboration with my colleagues at this institution. We use this concept to work on concerns and themes around marginalization, deviance and normalcy, stigmatization, deliberate democracy and participation, bottom-up engagement and the re-appropriation of infrastructural technologies along these concerns and through the concept. Or research foci are broadly situated, as also the collaborators at the research unit have a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and touch on health and medicine, disaster and crisis, urbanity and rurality, aging, and similar themes, with an specific focus on technology, induced by STS scholarship. The larger effort of the research unit is constituted in establishing connections between these themes along infrastructures in a broad conception and the application of the concept of care.

A key part of my work is teaching at the University of Vienna and every one and a half year or so also am a guest lecturer around at institutions the world, teaching courses on my scholarly work to a variety of audiences and to different disciplines: To get new ideas and perspectives, to have exchange with future scholars, but also to test, facilitate, and advocate for my own ideas and perceptions of what I understand as an important contribution to society.

--- After graduation from RPI, I started working for the UN on a project that was focused on bottom-up engagement. The work focused on applying my newly developed concept of “care” that can be applied as a (more or less) ethical as well as theoretical framework for dealing with key societal questions. In this particular case we worked with a variety of bottom-up technology development collectives that provide health tools for personal use and developed a strategy for open and deliberative participation.

From there on I worked on a variety of research projects that work on infrastructural technologies primarily, and finally led to the founding of the research unit I work at now, together with colleagues that shared my interests and transcended them. My works focus until then, as they still are, were focused on care as a means for communal maintenance work (in terms of an collaborative effort of maintaining technological infrastructure, but also on developing new and transforming already existing ones, as so they support a more deliberative, communitarian social organization that favors participation). Recurrent themes, in both my research, teaching but also for the institution I am affiliated with, are normalcy and differentiation, marginalization, deliberative democracy and its limits, vulnerability and the application and further re-appropriation and re-specification of our concept of care to deal with such questions.