Dr. Klaus BEHNAM SHAD

Klaus Behnam Shad is a Social and Cultural Anthropologist and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg. He completed his studies in Musicology and Anthropology at the University of Cologne and earned his PhD from the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin (2020), with a dissertation later published as Die emotionale Erfahrung des Asyls (Springer, 2021, Open Access). His research combines Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA), narrative theory, and digital humanities methods to investigate identity, migration, and social categorisation. His second book, The Sorting of Humanity (transcript, 2026, Open Access), draws on systems theory and political and psychological anthropology to analyse human differentiation practices. His current research extends this theoretical grounding into the methodological development of QDA frameworks for large-scale oral history corpora, combining qualitative research design with computational and AI-assisted approaches. At the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, Klaus serves as Principal Investigator of the LIFE Project (2024–2027) and leads the development of a FAIR-compliant digital research infrastructure for qualitative data management and analysis, and oral history workflows at the LHI team. This end-to-end research data pipeline covers:

• QDA workflow design & qualitative research infrastructure for audiovisual oral history corpora
• Transcription & NLP pipelines with human-in-the-loop correction
• Metadata architecture & schema validation (CMDI, Dublin Core, JSON Schema, CI/CD-enforced)
• AI-assisted qualitative data processing grounded in established QDA methodology
• Privacy-by-Design implementation (GDPR Art. 89, consent-driven access control, interoperability across CLARIN, Dataverse, and CatDV)
• Research Data Management (RDM) and Open Science practice

Across his work, sociocybernetic and complexity-theoretical frameworks inform both his empirical analyses and his approach to designing qualitative research infrastructures.