New PhD Fellow Sahil Borse
Welcome to Sahil Borse, who holds a Master of International Affairs at the Hertie School of Governance.
Sahils says:
"I am pleased to be joining the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies as a PhD Fellow, where I will contribute to WP4 of the "Before the Image" project.
Over the past two years in Berlin, I completed my Master of International Affairs at the Hertie School of Governance, where my thesis examined the compliance of AI-assisted targeting systems with international humanitarian law in conflict zones. This was complemented by my work as an open-source investigator with Amnesty International's Digital Verification Corps, verifying visual evidence of human rights violations; including police violence against protesters in Berlin and Turkey, and the use of loitering munitions in Ukraine.
Through my doctoral project, I aim to examine how OSINT training communities produce, transmit, and renegotiate the epistemological foundations of visual literacy. That is, how practitioners are taught to distinguish trustworthy visual evidence from the fabricated, and how those standards shift as AI-generated imagery increasingly blurs that line. The project combines ethnographic fieldwork within these training communities with a public-facing exhibition comparing how trained investigators and non-expert audiences interpret contested images."