About me

Dr Philipp Seuferling is LSE Fellow in Media and Communication in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.

Dr Seuferling earned his Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, in October 2021. His doctoral thesis is entitled “Media and the refugee camp: the historical making of space, time, and politics in the modern refugee regime” (view here). In the study, he explores the historical role of media practices and media technologies in experiencing and governing refugee camps in Germany since 1945. For the thesis Dr Seuferling has received the Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group at the International Communication Association (ICA). Dr Seuferling holds degrees from Hamburg University (B.A.) and Lund University (M.Sc.). During the spring term of 2022, he was a visiting researcher at the Department for Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (NYU).

In his current research, Dr Seuferling focuses on historical and contemporary mediations of state borders. Critically investigating contemporary imaginaries of “smart borders” alongside historical developments of media technologies in border governance, he aims to scrutinize how borders are cultural techniques, fundamentally enabled by media practices and technologies of filtering and differentiating. During his stay at NYU, he conducted an archival case study of the Ellis Island immigration station and its early fantasies and practices around media technologies in governing the migrant body and decision-making at the border.

Expertise Details

media and migration studies; media history; memory studies

Selected publications

Leurs, K., and Seuferling, P. (2022). “Migration and the ‘deep time’ of media infrastructures”. Communication, Culture & Critique 15(2), 290–297. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac019
Kaun, A., Logsdon, A. and Seuferling, P. (2022, forthcoming). “Serving Machines: Technology Development in Heterotopian Media Backends”. In: Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander de Ridder (eds.). Media Backends: Infrastructure, Algorithms, and the Politics of Knowing. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Seuferling, P. (2021). Media and the refugee camp: the historical making of space, time, and politics in the modern refugee regime. PhD thesis. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola.
Seuferling, P. and Leurs, K. (2021). “Histories of humanitarian technophilia: How imaginaries of media technologies have shaped migration infrastructures”. Mobilities 16(5), 670–687.
Seuferling, P. (2020). “Hopeful and Obligatory Remembering: Mediated Memory in Refugee Camps in Post-War Germany”. Mediální studia, 14(1), 13–33.
Wagner, H. and Seuferling, P. (2020). “Uses of the Past in Refugee Documentaries in Sweden and Germany. Conceptualising entangled histories of media, memory, and migration”. Media History 26(1), 91–104.
Seuferling, P. (2019). “’We Demand Better Ways to Communicate’: Pre-Digital Media Practices in Refugee Camps”. Media and Communication 7(2), 207–217.
Seuferling, P. (2021). “Immobile Socialities? Historicising Media Practices in Refugee Camps”. In: Annette Hill, Maren Hartmann, Magnus Andersson (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities. London: Routledge, pp. 302–319.

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