Rachele Pierini

Project description

International research is often presented as cross-border collaboration, while the infrastructures that enable it remain largely invisible. Diplomacy Designers focuses on this crucial yet under-analysed dimension: the building of sustained international research infrastructures. Using two case studies of digital humanities projects, it examines the everyday work of coordination, mediation, and conceptual and cultural translation required to keep such infrastructures functional. By foregrounding bottom-up practices and the variables shaping collaboration in a rapidly changing academic, geopolitical, and technological landscape, the project reframes Science Diplomacy as a set of everyday practices embedded in infrastructure design and governance. It shows how trust-building, coordination across epistemic cultures, and negotiation of difference are actively performed long before research becomes policy-relevant. In presenting humanities-based digital infrastructures as active sites of diplomatic practice and knowledge production, the project contributes to current debates on Science Diplomacy through an infrastructure-centred, practice-based perspective rooted in the humanities.

Short Bio

Rachele Pierini is a historical linguist and Aegeanist specialising in the historical linguistics of Greek, from its earliest attestation in Mycenaean to later alphabetic developments. Her research explores the linguistic and cultural entanglement between substrate and early Greek societies in the Bronze Age Aegean through languages, material culture, and natural resources. She is co-founder of MASt (Meetings on Aegean Studies) and co-editor of Dress for Success (2024) and Thronos. Historical Grammar of Furniture (2021).