1. Symposia

In May 2024, HUD curated its first public symposium, attended by leading social scientists, architects, and practitioners whose work explores the connections between technology, aesthetics, humanitarianism, and more. The event was an opportunity for HUD’s core team to engage in a series of conversations with those experts, expanding the horizons of what constitute the different possible futures for humanitarian design. The event was co-organized by the University of Copenhagen, HEAD Genève, the Geneva Graduate Institute, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne.

You can find more details about the symposium, including full videos of its keynotes here.

2. Media Coverage

HUD’s research activities are also focused on engaging with the wider audiences, including humanitarian practitioners, policymakers, civil society, and the general public. Below you can find a selection of recent media coverage of HUD’s research.

Political Violence and Prisons // Neue Zürcher Zeitung

In 2025, Jonathan Luke Austin, one of HUD’s Principal Investigators was interviewed by the Swiss newspaper of record, Neue Zürcher Zeitung about his work on political violence, prisons, and torture. The interview explored the conditions of possibility underlying torture and political violence more broadly, focusing on the cases of Syria and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This research forms the basis for HUD’s work on violence prevention more broadly. The interview was published in both German and English. You can access an English version at this link.

Engaged Science

Anna Leander published an article with the Académie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales blog exploring the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in producing different forms of ‘engaged’ science, something central to HUD’s overall research ethos.

3. Multimedia Content

Fragments from the Subterranean

This short film, produced by HUD’s PhD candidates, Maevia Griffiths, Damien Greder, and Nora Doukkali, as well as MA student Ila Schoop Rutten, explores questions relating to the treatment of undocumented migrants in Geneva, Switzerland. In doing so, it relates to one of HUD’s core goals: not to see spaces of humanitarianism as ‘exceptional’ or existing only in the global south, but as a transnational phenomenon. You can read more about the project here.

Grievable//Ungrievable

This short exerpimental film was produced as a collaboration between students, film-makers, a dancer, a sound designer, and others as part of a research project that preceded HUD – the Violence Prevention Initiative – led by Jonathan Luke Austin. The film abstracts the process of ‘becoming violent’ in detention settings through the use of dance, sound, and immersive visual lanscapes.

Synthetic Vision for Humanitarian Subversion

As part of the HUD research essay Synthetic vision for humanitarian subversion, Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths produced the following multimedia video splicing together extracts from Griffith’s film-making work (see above) with technical videos on violence-detection technologies and videos on the role of media in transforming the conditions of possibility for violence in society.