Double Funding Success for Maxime Le Calvé

Maxime Le Calvé has received two major project funding commitments at once this summer: an ERC Starting Grant and the approval for an Emmy Noether Research Group. Both projects grew out of Maxime’s many years of research at the Cluster »Matters of Activity«.

Maxime’s ethnographic ERC project APORIA focuses on moments in neurosurgery, design, and fieldwork where getting stuck becomes a catalyst for insight and imagination, challenging the frictionless ideology of current AI tools. The project centers on the process of gaining knowledge and the role that moments of puzzlement play in understanding a subject. To explore this, researchers will develop playful devices where AI serves as one tool among many, rather than dominating the process or dictating solutions.

Complementing this, the Emmy Noether Early Career Research Group »Sketchy Brain Modelling in Cognitive Neurosurgery: Towards a Speculative Medical Anthropology« will analyze the limitations of current surgical brain models. Through multimodal ethnography, the team will develop workshop formats for medical students and surgeons, co-create two prototypes for neuroanatomical education using sketches and augmented reality, and present their findings in participatory exhibitions across Berlin, Paris, and Tübingen.

Crucially, both projects are anchored in the Speculative Realities Lab (SpecLab) – an interdisciplinary platform initiated by Maxime alongside neurosurgeon Thomas Picht within Matters of Activity. It is through the SpecLab that both initiatives remain directly and actively associated with the Cluster.

We warmly congratulate Maxime and wish him the very best as he continues his work at the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science at the University of Tübingen!