Prof. Dr. Matthias Leese

Matthias Leese is Assistant Professor for Technology and Governance at the Department of Humanities, Political and Social Sciences, ETH Zurich. He works at the intersections of International Relations, Criminology, and Science and Technology Studies. In the tradition of Science and Technology Studies, he sees technology as a mediator for knowledge and action. In this capacity, it plays a key role in how social order is imagined, produced, and maintained. In his research, Matthias investigates how the implementation of new technological tools transforms these processes. To do so, he focuses on security organizations and explores their rationales and practices that are co-constituted between the technological and the social.

To explore the lifeworlds of security professionals, Matthias prefers to employ qualitative empirical methods that allow to capture the formation of socio-technical relations in a detailed, in-depth fashion. In the past, he has conducted studies on predictive policing, EU AFSJ databases, aviation security, research governance, as well as science and innovation policy.

Matthias is currently Principal Investigator at the CURATE Project (ERC/SERI Starting Grant) that investigates data quality and related practices in European law enforcement and border control. He also serves on the Management Committee for DATAMIG, an EU COST Action for research collaborations on data and technology in the field of migration.

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