Research · Strategy · Human–Technology Systems

I map how people
actually make
sense of systems

Anthropologist. Harvard Kennedy School. I translate field evidence — from post-Soviet landscapes to digital payment flows — into decisions that move organisations forward.

Systems Mapping AI & Digital Behaviour Qualitative Research Harvard Kennedy School Ethnography Decision Sciences Perception Mapping Translating Data into Action
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A Different Kind of Researcher

01

Field research built over ten years, not in a lab.

My methods were developed across a decade of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork — navigating competing languages, contested meanings, and communities that had never been studied before. That kind of rigour is rare. I bring it to every research problem.

02

Harvard Kennedy School trained me to turn evidence into decisions.

My focus at HKS is Management, Leadership and Decision Sciences. Research that doesn't move an organisation is archive material. I arrive with both the field evidence and the strategic framework to make it actionable for leadership.

03

I study AI as a transformation of human identity — not just a market shift.

My research examines how AI and internet connectivity are changing who we are as a species. This is an epochal shift. That long lens — civilisational rather than quarterly — gives depth that most researchers simply don't bring to technology questions.

04

Two institutions. Two entirely different ways of knowing.

A PhD built on a decade of original fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan. An MPA from Harvard Kennedy School focused on strategy and decision-making. These aren't credentials that usually go together — and the combination produces something genuinely unusual.

What I Bring to Your Organisation

Systems Mapping

I map how different people inside the same system interpret their environment — finding the gap between stated intent and lived experience. From post-Soviet landscapes to digital platforms, the method scales.

AI & Digital Behaviour Research

I study how digitalisation reshapes trust, identity, and social cohesion — grounded in philosophy, anthropology, and quantitative literacy from HKS. I don't just describe the change. I model what it means for human behaviour at scale.

Translating Evidence into Decisions

My HKS training in Decision Sciences means I move from raw qualitative data to insight to stakeholder-ready recommendation. Fluent in the language of both fieldwork and leadership rooms.

Education

Harvard Kennedy School

Master of Public Administration

Management, Leadership & Decision Sciences

  • Data and Research Methods Trek (STEM) — applied quantitative & research methods with data science and policy practitioners
  • Decision Sciences: evidence, uncertainty, and strategic judgment
  • Leadership and organisational management
  • Cross-disciplinary work with AI researchers, philosophers & policy leaders

University of Tübingen

Doctor of Philosophy — Anthropology

Dissertation: Sacred Threads, Leisurely Waves: Mapping Perception Shifts at the Yssyk-Köl Lake

  • 10-year multi-site ethnographic fieldwork, Kyrgyzstan
  • Post-Soviet studies, environmental humanities, tourism & religion
  • Research affiliate, Global Ethics Institute — AI, digitalisation & philosophical anthropology
  • Fluent in Kyrgyz, Russian, German, English

AI, Digitalisation & Human Transformation

Digitalisation is not a product problem.
It is an epochal shift in how humans exist.

At the University of Tübingen's Global Ethics Institute, my research sits at the intersection of philosophy, anthropology, and technology. The question I pursue: how are AI and the internet changing who we are as a species?

This is not a metaphor. Digitisation is restructuring the architectures of trust, reciprocity, and identity that hold communities together. My research on digital payment systems is one entry point into a much larger argument — that the social infrastructure humans built over millennia is being quietly dismantled and rebuilt by platforms, algorithms, and network effects.

Harvard Kennedy School put me in rooms with decision-makers, pioneers of AI–human interaction, and moral philosophers thinking seriously about what technology is doing to human society. That cross-disciplinary fluency — moving between philosophical anthropology and strategic decision-making — is the competence I bring to organisations navigating AI.

AI Ethics Digital Anthropology Platform Behaviour Human–Tech Systems Philosophical Research Trust & Identity
"Digital payments don't just change how money moves. They change who people trust — and what trust means."

Research Thread

How digital financial infrastructure disrupts informal reciprocity and cohesion-building in communities — studied through philosophical anthropology and field ethnography.

Affiliation: Global Ethics Institute, University of Tübingen

Case Study — Field Research

Six User Groups. One Ecosystem.
Entirely Different Mental Models.

A multi-site systems-mapping study of how sacred meaning, therapeutic value, environmental concern, and recreational identity coexist — and conflict — within a single geographic system.

The Research Problem

Organisations and governments treated Lake Yssyk-Köl as a single resource. In practice, six distinct communities — pilgrims, sanatorium patients, environmental activists, Soviet-era medical professionals, domestic tourists, and regional administrators — held incompatible models of what it was for.

The research question: what does each group believe this system is, and how do those beliefs structure behaviour?

Methods

  • Multi-site ethnographic fieldwork, north and south shores
  • 200+ in-depth interviews across six communities
  • Participant observation at sanatoriums, pilgrimage sites, tourist zones
  • Discourse analysis of post-Soviet medicalization narratives
  • Perception mapping — divergence across mental models
  • 10-year longitudinal dataset
01

Sacredness is a System, Not a Belief

Sacred meaning was produced through repeated ritual, landscape encounter, and social reinforcement. Any intervention that disrupted these mechanisms disrupted the meaning system itself.

02

Inherited Institutions Shape Present Behaviour

The Soviet sanatorium system created medical authority that persisted post-independence. Users narrated the lake through therapeutic frames inherited from institutional memory.

03

Ownership is Negotiated, Not Assigned

Legal ownership and felt ownership were in constant negotiation. The gap between formal system and lived system is where both conflict and opportunity live.

Research — Digital Systems

Affiliation

Global Ethics Institute, University of Tübingen

Domain

Digital Anthropology · AI Ethics · FinTech Behaviour

Lens

Philosophical anthropology of technology

Training

HKS — Management, Leadership & Decision Sciences; Data and Research Methods Trek (STEM)

Methods

Qualitative field research · Philosophical analysis · Cross-disciplinary synthesis

When Payments Go Digital,
What Else Changes?

In communities where cash was the primary medium of exchange, money was also the primary medium of social ritual. Wedding gifts, funeral contributions, debt between neighbours — these were never just transactions. They were the infrastructure of trust.

When digital payment platforms enter these communities, the transaction becomes frictionless. But the ritual disappears. The cohesion-building mechanism — the delay, the physical presence, the social weight — is gone.

My research investigates this not as a usability problem but as a philosophical anthropology problem: what happens to human cohesion when the systems that produce it are replaced by systems optimised for efficiency?

This connects to the broader framework — that AI and digitalisation represent an epochal transformation in how humans construct identity, trust, and collective meaning.

Digital Payments Social Cohesion Trust Systems Platform Anthropology AI Ethics

About

Nurzat König

Nurzat König

Researcher · Harvard Kennedy School · PhD Anthropology, Tübingen

I grew up in Kyrgyzstan and have spent more than a decade studying how people make meaning — at a post-Soviet lake, across cultural boundaries, and now in the spaces where digital systems and human identity collide.

My PhD from Tübingen gave me ten years of original field evidence. Harvard Kennedy School gave me the strategic frameworks to translate that evidence into decisions. The combination is unusual. I use it deliberately.

At HKS I focused on Management, Leadership and Decision Sciences. The Data and Research Methods Trek put me in collaborative environments with data scientists and policy practitioners. I am fluent in cross-functional rooms — equally comfortable with ethnographic fieldwork and strategic recommendation.

At the Global Ethics Institute at the University of Tübingen, I worked on the philosophical dimensions of AI — how algorithmic systems are reshaping the architectures of trust and identity at a civilisational scale.

I am looking for organisations that believe research should be uncomfortable, specific, and actionable.

Let's Work Together

Ready to bring research
that moves teams.

Open to roles in UX research, design strategy, AI ethics research, and human-centred product development. Open to relocating.

nurzat.koenig@gmail.com LinkedIn View Work