Robert is a Science and Technology studies (STS) scholar doing research in the ontological politics of technology. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and a Habilitation in Sociology. Robert has extensive experience in doing research and teaching STS, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), mobilities, and political ontology; doing interdisciplinary research in local and international settings with multinational teams; and wide-ranging methodological experience in qualitative, ethnographic and participatory action research. Robert’s research investigates technological regimes of power/knowledge and the working of apparatuses of power. Working critically with the new mobilities paradigm and its conceptualization of automobility as a self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system, Robert’s work considers automobility as a case of a new techno-social nomos of the Earth. This has created a post-colonial regime of technoscientific truth that has appropriated the Globe, creating a new Jus Publicum Europaeum.

His research is concerned with technology as a socio-political assemblage with a wide range of power and political implications. He addresses impacts in the ontological and epistemic: being mindful that ontology (considered from an ethnomethodology perspective the mundane lifeworld and its inscriptions) is politics that has forgotten itself. Beyond the political ontology of automobility, he is also interested in the effects of generative AI (LLMs) on our socio-political construct: epistemic institutions, political systems and forces influencing global conflicts.

Robert is engaged in discussions around different concepts of the Anthropocene. He enters the Anthropocene debate from an STS perspective: how modern scientific assumptions of the real enact the social and political order of our time. Within an Anthropocene frame he discusses anthropogenic violence against fellow humans but also against more-than-humans – animals, other living beings, and even inanimate matter. Reflections on science include the use and misuse of science for various political agendas, from climate emergency denial to the weaponization of academic integrity processes such as plagiarism and research ethics, in various politicized settings. His research concerns the politics of scientific institutional practices, the emerging field of quantum social science and its application in studying aspects of various forms of violence.

In his last book (with Richard Randell) he furthered the understanding of automobility, which they have conceptualized as an imaginary, as a nomos, and as a political ontology. In their current work they conceptualize apparatuses that are built into everyday life that reproduce themselves through mundane constitutive violence. He also conceptualizes alternative ontologies, namely, quantum theory to provide possible paths for moving towards a post-Anthropocene of pluriverse ontologies not predicated on a One-World-World ontology, sovereign power and the constitutive violence.