Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Raffaela Kunz
2022-2023
Discipline(s)
Law
Theme(s)
Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation; Information & media
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Raffaela Kunz (born 1986 in Solothurn, Switzerland) is a legal scholar with a particular interest in questions of normative pluralism. Moreover, she engages in questions around international courts and tribunals, the relationship between international and domestic law, Swiss constitutional law, and human rights theory.
Before joining the Collegium, Raffaela was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, leading the research project Scientific Blogs as Infrastructure for Digital Publishing and Academic Communication. She has been a lecturer in public international law at the Europa-Institut of Saarland University and a fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. Raffaela holds a PhD from the University of Basel. Her thesis was awarded the 2018 prize of the Swiss Society of International Law.
Since August 2023, Raffaela has been a UZH Postdoc Grant recipient and an SNSF postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Legal Sociology at the University of Zurich.
Research Project
Rethinking Science in Times of Open Science?
The possibility to make research and data readily available to everyone around the globe who has access to an internet connection is commonly seen as an enormous opportunity to speed up scientific discoveries. At the same time, certain problematic dynamics and trends in science are exacerbated under the guise of open science. On the one hand, the increasing use of digital tools in research further strengthens the position of commercial actors who offer most of the digital services used in science, raising concerns about large-scale influence and the corporate capture of science. On the other hand, the massive push for openness from science policymakers feeds concerns about an instrumentalization of science and undue state influence. This begs the question: is open science a “constitutional moment” or a threat to the autonomy and integrity of science?
Through the perspective of systems theory, this project analyzed the developments in science in close connection to open science. Are we witnessing a creeping dedifferentiation of the science system? And what is the role of the law in countering these trends?
Research Interests:
problematic dynamics and trends in science; digital tools in research; instrumentalization of science