Maximilian Pieper

I am a sociologist with a special interest in the role of technology and infrastructure in the ecological crises of the Anthropocene. My research is anchored in environmental sociology and the sociology of technology. That being said, the themes of my research are fundamentally interdisciplinary, spanning from history to anthropology, philosophy and social theory.

I studied at the University of Augsburg and the Technical University of Munich (TUM). As part of the first IDK cohort, I pursued my PhD at the University of Augsburg from October 2021 to February 2026.

In my dissertation, I investigated the phenomenon of technology fetishism – the innate tendency to reify technological capacities into applied knowledge or individual artifacts while severing them from their global sociomaterial requirements and repercussions.

In my postdoc, I aim to investigate societal processes of “unbuilding” – a term that encapsulates processes of unbuilding infrastructures but also institutions or individual behavioral patterns. What unifies these diverse arenas is the peculiar shift from the modernist outlook towards a fundamentally open future with the potential to be better than the past towards an understanding of future as something that is blocked through the path dependencies of what has been built in the present – be that the expected emissions of coal power plants running for another decade, the perceived slowness of democratic institutions or the internalized productivity demands of a society built around work. What I am interested in here is not only the understanding of the future being blocked by the sediments of the past but more importantly how unbuilding plays out as a counter strategy to such a blocked future and is enacted through material infrastructure, institutions and individual practice.

The process of unbuilding fundamentally challenges modernist understandings of continued progress and linear time. It opens up questions on the possibility of reversing ecological damage while also shining a light on conflicts and power dynamics that generally tend to be overlooked. The key questions will be: Can the past be unbuilt? To what extent? And who has the resources to do so.