Dr. Anke Gruendel

Anke Gruendel is the Academic Coordinator of the Leuphana Transformation Lab in the program »Embracing Transformation«. From 2021-2025, she was a research associate at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and part of the international research collective Governing Through Design.

She holds an MA in Design Studies from Parsons, The New School for Design, and a PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research. Her research interests include technopolitics, political and technical infrastructures, modern forms of political rationality, as well as theories of democracy and the political.

In her current research, she focuses on public sector design in modern technical democracies in which governing and planning have become a site for critical inquiry. She investigates the participatory dimensions of design as a material enactment of democratic norms in which lived experience and situated knowledge are part of a new political epistemology. With a particular emphasis on understanding the conditions of possibility for the political relevance of embodied design practices as forms of material participation, she seeks to understand how government today is beginning to draw on a global network of public sector innovation that aims to radically transform how public policies and services are formulated and implemented.

Through the diverse practices and discourses of public sector innovation, she is interested in developing a broader perspective on how democracy continues to become reconfigured in relation to ostensibly technical questions.