Doctoral Researchers

After completing his studies in Political Science and Psychology at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Dominik Austrup proceeded in his academic endeavours with a master’s degree in Political Theory at the Goethe-University Frankfurt in cooperation with the Technical-University Darmstadt. He spent a semester abroad at the New School for Social Research in New York. His research mostly concerns the question of how social movements interact with political legitimacy from a political realist perspective.

In 2013 he earned his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Aarhus University - that included a one-year stint at the Global and European Studies Institute at the University of Leipzig. Upon gaining working experience as an English teacher in Bogota (Colombia), he began the master’s program in politics, economics, and philosophy at Universität Hamburg from which he graduated in spring 2018. Since then he has been working on his dissertation at Universität Hamburg, while also gaining some teaching experience. His research interests span the fields of deliberative and epistemic theories democracy, preference/belief-formation (in particular adaptive preferences) and ideology critique.

He holds a master degree in economics from the Erasmus School of Economics (Rotterdam). He has also studied economics in Passau, Victoria (Canada), and Halle and has completed a master degree in business and economic law. Before joining the DFG Graduate Program ‘Collective Decision-Making’, he has worked as a research and teaching associate at the Chair of Microeconomics (Lydia Mechtenberg) at Uni Hamburg. He investigates how communication and social norms influence collective decisions mainly employing experimental methods.

After studying business administration and sinology in Konstanz and Beijing, Christian Carl completed two Master’s degrees – one in “Ethics – Economics, Law and Politics” (similar to PEP) in Bochum and Utrecht, and one in philosophy in Frankfurt. Being most intrigued by normative questions of political and social life, his main research interests lie within political philosophy/theory. In particular, he focuses on democratic theory and topics related to transnational justice. Besides this, he has developed a keen interest in Chinese political philosophy and transcultural approaches to philosophy. Having studied both within the social sciences and the humanities, he strongly believes that socio-political problems become tangible only when examined from an interdisciplinary perspective.

She obtained both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Mannheim, with economics as a minor. Additionally, she took classes in political science. She spent an exchange semester at the University of Leiden where she attended courses from the philosophy, politics and economics program. She is particularly interested in contractarianism and political legitimacy, considering it worthwhile to apply approaches and methods from economics such as public choice and game theory to political philosophy.

She studied International Business Administration, Political Science and Philosophy in Berlin, Cartagena and Hamburg. Her research interests include theories of justice, equality and democracy. In her doctoral dissertation she focuses on aleatoric political systems. She examines the potential of employing groups of randomly selected citizens instead of elected politicians to transform individual interests into collective political decision. Her paper „The Egalitarian Quality of Lottocracy” has been published in Quaderns de Filosofia.

She obtained her Bachelor in 'International Cultural and Business Studies' from the University of Passau with an exchange semester in Argentina and internship stages at the UN, GFA Development Consulting and the German-Peruvian Chamber of Commerce. Recently she has graduated from a M.Sc. in 'Development Economics' at Lund University, Sweden where she worked simultaneously as a research assistant in a project about economic shrinking. Her main interests focus on theories of inequality, labour economics and the importance of human capital for sustainable development.

She holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Political Science from the Universität Hamburg, the latter with a specialization in Comparative and Area Studies. She spent a semester at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. During her Master’s she worked in a research project on right-wing populism at the Helmut-Schmidt-University. In her master thesis, she examined differences in constitutional compliance between governments with and without populist participation. She is interested in populism, judicial politics as well as computational text analysis.

He has been a doctoral student in economics and a research associate in economics and philosophy at the Universität Hamburg since 2019. Before, he graduated with a bachelor degree in economics and a master degree in public economics, law and politics from the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. His research is concerned with welfare economics, social choice theory, and practical philosophy. Topics include the formal analysis of aggregation procedures, positional ranking rules, facts and norms in aggregation, interpersonal utility comparisons, welfarism, utilitarianism, consequentialism and intrinsic value.

Filippo Riscica Lizzio graduated in Philosophy at the universities of Catania (BA cum laude) and Bologna (MA cum laude). While at the University of Bologna, he spent visiting periods at the University of Helsinki and at the University of Nottingham. After these experiences, he attended the Logic Year Program at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam. His research interests lie at the intersection between social epistemology, formal epistemology, logic and political philosophy, focusing on the epistemic effects of group deliberations in political decisions.

Sophia Schulze Schleithoff is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy. She holds a BSc in Economics, a BA in Philosophy, and a MSc in Politics, Economics and Philosophy from Universität Hamburg. Focusing on collective responsibility, her research interests are in applied ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and the history of ideas. Her research investigates the impact of automating parts of collective decision-making on the capacity of individuals to take responsibility; and it examines whether they can be legitimately expected to do so in a given institutional setting.

She is a doctoral student in Economics with a focus on experimental research. She holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Bayreuth and a MSc in Business Administration from the Humboldt University of Berlin with exchange semesters in Oslo and Montréal. In both programs, she graduated with empirical theses on technology acceptance, which were selected for publication in international research journals. Arna gained professional experience working for a university spin-off and a strategy consultancy in applied behavioural, personnel, and organisational research. She is interested in the effect of technology and autonomous systems on ethical decision-making in groups.