Gerko Egert
I am a media and performance studies scholar. My research intersects the concepts of movement, media and politics to address the contemporary state of logistic capitalism and its extractivist operations. I am working as a lecturer at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
I am currently completing a new monograph on the politics of movement in logistical production and technologies of movement-based surveillance. Drawing on my longstanding interest and extensive research in choreography, the work focuses on digital technologies, media, and the datafication of movement at multiple scales (body, city, planet).
My second area of research is extractivism and its relation to climate politics. I analyze the infrastructural violence, data politics, and media technologies that shape capitalist economies and the geopolitics of extractivism. I focus on oil and gas exploration, as well as coal and mineral extraction in Europe.
I have written extensively on dance and performance, published in two monographs. Moving Relation. Touch in Contemporary Dance (2016 Transcript Verlag, 2020 Routledge [English translation]) focuses on practices and theories of touch and their relation to movement, affect, and experience in dance. The second monograph (2025 August Verlag) discusses contemporary performance politics with a focus on artistic modes of planetary practice.
In 2020 I co-founded the publishing platform nocturne (with Julia Bee). We explore experimental forms of pedagogy between academia, art and activism.
Thinking about experimental publishing and/or pedagogy is also part of my writing.