3 questions for…Dr. Niloufar Vadiati

29. Januar 2026

Foto: Dr. Niloufar Vadiati

Niloufar Vadiati is an urbanist and digital geographer. She is currently an interdisciplinary research fellow at the Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Hamburg. Previously, she was a DFG Walter Benjamin fellow, where she conducted research on Grassroots Digital Urbanism in Berlin.

She holds a PhD in Urban Geography from HafenCity University Hamburg, an MSc in Spatial Planning from the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, and a BA in Urban Studies from the University of Tehran.

Niloufar serves as Associate Editor of Digital Geography and Society Journal and has lectured on Digital Urbanism at Leuphana University as well as on Digitalisation and Metropolitan Culture at HafenCity University Hamburg. Beyond academia, she is the producer and host of Digital Urbanism, from the Grassroots, a podcast exploring critical perspectives on technology and urban life.

1. What are your research topics and what are you currently working on?

As part of Professor Witt’s team, I am supporting the drafting of a proposal for a DFG Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) on planetary health from the perspectives of the arts and humanities.

My current research spans several projects and topics at the moments, as I am simultaneously working on a paper examining the reconfiguration of rental housing in Berlin through digital platforms, focusing on their infrastructures and speculative roles, especially through automation processes. And, I am working on a new paper project on bio-technological experimentation, libertarian governance, and the distortion of health and urbanisation. 

2. What fascinates you about Liberal Arts & Sciences and how does your stay at ILAS enrich your research?

What fascinates me about the Institute of Liberal Arts & Sciences is its knowledge and habitus infrastructure, which brings together genuinely different perspectives and intellectual circles, making interdisciplinarity a lived practice of research rather than a rhetorical claim. For my work in critical and feminist digital geography, this means engaging with scholars who approach digitalisation, society, and power from distinct disciplinary and positional standpoints, enabling me to see my research objects differently and to challenge my established-felt modes of thinking. Also, it is the first time in my academic career that my scope of research is shifting from the grassroots and urban scale to a planetary scale, whatever “planetary” could mean. Still, for me, this is something beyond the territorial and epistemic grounds I have so far worked within.

3. What projects do you have planned for your time at ILAS?

Alongside drafting a proposal for a DFG Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg), we are planning for launching a lecture series on planetary health from the perspectives of the arts and humanities, aiming to open up critical and interdisciplinary conversations beyond scientific and anthropocentric framings, from the history of cybernetics to planetary experiments, climate justice, and so on.