Dr. Niclas Rautenberg

• Phenomenology, especially phenomenology of conflict, critical and applied phenomenology
• Social and political philosophy, and its methodology
• Philosophy and ethics of conflict
• Critical theory, especially critical philosophy of race and feminist phenomenology
• Theories of flourishing; virtue ethics
• Qualitative research methods
• Metanormative theory, especially metaethics
• Normative and applied ethics
• Moral psychology

Niclas is a postdoctoral fellow in the research group Ethics in Information Technology (EIT) and the emerging field Grounds, Norms, Decisions at the University of Hamburg. His work lies at the intersections of phenomenology, social and political philosophy, and qualitative social research. In the recent past, he has focused his research efforts primarily on political conflict – a phenomenon often alluded to in practical philosophy, but rarely investigated in its own right.

His current research project, titled ‘Virtual Battlefields: Political Conflict in Digital Spaces’, elaborates a systematic account of the structure and experiential character of digital conflict as a challenge to collective sense- and decision-making. The project entails qualitative interviews with political actors – politicians, activists, and public servants – and draws on the resources of phenomenology and critical theory to provide an experientially-informed basis for political philosophy. By highlighting the conflictual, but productive, potential of the virtual world, the project is situated between overly pessimistic and optimistic assessments of the digital age. The central objective is not to show what the digital world fundamentally lacks, but in what different ways political conflict manifests in that world. The research forms part of the funding program „Postdoctoral Fellowships“ within the Excellence Strategy (Universität Hamburg).

Niclas’s doctoral dissertation, supervised by Prof Fabian Freyenhagen and Dr Jörg Schaub at the University of Essex, built the foundation of this work. Titled ‘Colliding Worlds: Prolegomena to a Critical Phenomenology of Political Conflict’ and currently under contract with the Routledge Research in Phenomenology Series, it critically engages with philosophical approaches to conflict and elaborates a more thorough understanding of the phenomenon, informed by existential phenomenology, feminism, critical philosophy of race, and the testimonies of Niclas’s interviewees. Niclas's doctoral research was funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE), and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

In the past, Niclas also served as research assistant in the interdisciplinary, UKRI-funded project ‘What does Artificial Intelligence Mean for the Future of Democratic Society?’, led by Dr Daragh Murray from Queen Mary University of London. The project develops a human rights framework to adequately gauge the cost of AI technologies on citizens’ identity formation and democratic capacities. Niclas was tasked with providing philosophical and ethical grounding for this work by analysing conceptions of flourishing.

Previously, Niclas studied philosophy, psychology, and political science at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Tours, and in the master’s programme ‘Politics, Economics and Philosophy’ at the University of Hamburg. His other research interests include metanormative theory (especially metaethics), normative and applied ethics, and moral psychology.

• Winter 2023/24 | SE (Master) Political Conflict (in English; co-taught)
• Winter 2023/24 | SE (Bachelor) Technikerfahrung (in German)
• Summer 2023 | LECT (Bachelor) Guest-Lecture: Critical Phenomenology: Four Approaches (in English; University of Essex)
• Summer 2023 | SE (Bachelor) Philosophie, IT & Gesellschaft (in German)
• Spring 2023 | LECT (Master) Guest-Lecture: The Phenomenology of Conflict Space (in English; University of Essex)
• Summer 2022 | LECT (Bachelor) Guest-Lecture: A Critical Phenomenology of Conflict Space (in English; University of Essex)
• Winter 2021/22 | LECT (Bachelor) Guest-Lecture: Waking up with Coates: from the “Dream” to Reality (in English; University of Essex)
• Summer 2016 | SE (Bachelor) Introduction to Political Philosophy (in German; as GTA)
• Winter 2015-16 | SE (Bachelor) Introduction to Ethics (in German; as GTA)
• Summer 2015 | SE (Bachelor) Introduction to Political Philosophy (in German; as GTA)

Niclas welcomes potential supervisees who want to write their bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral thesis in any of the above-mentioned research areas, especially when working on themes related to (information) technology.

Further, he is particularly interested in thesis projects that take an interdisciplinary angle, open a dialogue between analytic and continental philosophy, and/or aim to include perspectives often underrepresented in philosophy (e.g., queer, feminist, decolonial, postcolonial).

Niclas can supervise projects in German and English.

Journal Articles

• Rautenberg, Niclas. forthcoming. ‘Artificial Intelligence, Calculative Reason, and Technical Domination: Lessons from Husserl, Heidegger, and Marcuse’. AI & SOCIETY.
• Rautenberg, Niclas, 2025. ‘The Digital Classroom as a Site of Political Intervention? Phenomenological Considerations of the Entangled Times of Digitalization and Authoritarianism’. Frontiers in Communication 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1603650.
• Burch, Matthew, and Niclas Rautenberg. 2024. ‘Ideology as Modes of Being-With: An Existential-Phenomenological Contribution to Ideology Critique’. Philosophy & Social Criticism. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537241284540.
• Rautenberg, Niclas, and Daragh Murray. 2024. ‘Making Tangible the Long-Term Harm Linked to the Chilling Effects of AI-Enabled Surveillance: Can Human Flourishing Inform Human Rights?’ Human Rights Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-024-00727-6.
• Rautenberg, Niclas. 2024. ‘Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me: A Phenomenology of Racialized Conflict’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (1): 168–84. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2022.41.
• Rautenberg, Niclas. 2023. ‘Making Room for the Solution: A Critical and Applied Phenomenology of Conflict Space’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (3): 424-449. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2023.2264724  (shortlisted for the Robert Papazian Essay Prize 2023).
• Burch, Matthews, Niclas Rautenberg, and Diego Martínez-Zarazúa. 2022. ‘Review: Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, Sara Heinämaa (eds.): Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters’. Phenomenological Reviews. https://reviews.ophen.org/2022/09/05/phenomenology-as-critique-why-method-matters-review/.