2025-06-17 Interview: Maria Berlusconi

The crisis of the academic disciplines, marked by their ever-increasing specialisations, leads to a continuous cycle of knowledge production that rarely leaves academia and remains confined within scholarly boundaries (Klein 1990). Extracting actionable guidelines and steps from current academic research becomes a complex endeavor despite the excellent work in various fields, like the idea of Planetary Boundaries (Rockström et al. 2023), linking the effects of climate change to the question of justice, or research in architecture that investigates the relationship of labour and extraction practices in Cambodia to uncover the western dependance on modern slavery practices (Brickell et al. 2018). Besides these examples that link specific topics to the social, there is a substantial body of research that focuses on solving problems without addressing the question of social relevance—a sort of self-referential work (E.g., Yoshida 2024), based on a dystopian vision for the future of humanity.