Rebecca Puchta

Rebecca Puchta is a doctoral candidate at the DFG Research Training Group “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University, Frankfurt since 2017 and associated with the Research Unit Media and Participation. She studied Literary Studies and Economics, Law and Social Science at the University of Erfurt and Studies in European Culture in Constance and New Delhi. Her research interests lie in cultural and media theories, documentary film and governmentality studies. She has taught at the University of Vienna, the College of Fine Arts Berlin and Salem College.

In her PhD project “Thinking Images: Seeing and Saying in Documentary Film”, Rebecca Puchta dissects audiovisual images of digitization, surveillance and control found in contemporary documentary films such as Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, US 2014), Democracy (David Bernet, D, FR 2015) and Field of Vision – Project X (Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, US 2016). Focusing on aspects of expertise, access and translational processes, it investigates the production of knowledge in terms of big data and media infrastructures – in, with and through the moving image. This research relies on theories and methods from textual analysis, discourse analysis, anthropology as well as science and technology studies.

Research interests