My PhD project examines how visions of green development linked to the green hydrogen industry emerge, circulate, and are contested in Chilean Patagonia. Through a multi-sited ethnography in Patagonian, I investigate how local communities negotiate the socio-ecological promises and frictions of large-scale renewable energy transitions.
My project addresses the environmental crisis by arguing that fostering real change requires a radical shift in the assumptions underlying our ways of life. My thesis advocates for a transformation of our societal structures, opposing superficial adjustments, such as current sustainability policies, thus creating the space for new narratives to flourish. Developing these new narratives requires a multidisciplinary approach, given the complexity of the issue and the different spheres in which our assumptions operate.
My research explores how urban ecology and environmental education can transform informal paratransit stops into sustainable public spaces. By proposing a scalable model for urban resilience and ecological stewardship, the project addresses pressing development challenges in South Africa and offers adaptable insights for other African cities.
Is there a way to define aesthetic values in nature as intrinsic values, despite their anthropocentric origins? Can an awareness of aesthetic values be developed or trained, thereby encouraging behaviour that preserves nature?
Humans and Honeybees is a project in the history of knowledge, situated between historical anthropology and animal history. Drawing on texts, images, and material culture from around 1800, it explores how human encounters with honeybees shaped both ecosystems and societies. By tracing their entangled histories, the project examines the more-than-human dimensions of (early) modern knowledge production, focusing on a small insect and its complex relations with the human world.
How can social-emotional learning foster sustainable behavior and help pupils to deal with [climate-related] emotions?
Educational science assumes that learning takes place not only through explicit knowledge transfer, but also alongside it through unspoken values, norms or rituals of the education-al environment (“hidden curriculum”). My research project aims at investigating whether and how a hidden curriculum of schools might influence learning with regard to sustaina-bility.
The world’s oceans are vast and alive, teeming with more-than-human communities, entangled ecosystems, and storied histories. What can we learn from them about our collective futures amidst climate breakdown?
Using alpine grasslands as a case study, this project explores how socio-ecological transformations can be understood through a process-relational lens.
My project aims to analyze coal narratives through temporal and spatial lenses to reveal pathways for transforming (neo)extractivist discourses toward more sustainable and less disastrous futures in Río Turbio and similar contexts.
My project aims to yoke together ecocritical thinking, new materialism, and animist philosophy as critical approaches to reading contemporary Anthropocene poetries with an emphasis on text-world relations.
Chemicals have a negative reputation in the environmental discourse, sometimes they are even considered unnatural. But what does that mean, and how does it influence the way we perceive chemicals in our everyday lives?
If we want to succeed in building a good sustainable future for all, we need visions and stories about how this future looks. And we need ethical skills and moral values to carry them.
Transformation movements risk not adequately addressing the pressing social problems of our time. How can we make sure that those who have only been talked about are being heard?
An ethnographic inquiry into how two historical collections of drill core samples are written into contemporary climate discourses related to the underground.
While the idea of ‘invasive species’ should not be simply reduced to commonsensical and unquestionable, our obligation to care for the fast-changing world due to myriad anthropogenic activities also renders difficult decisions that translate into suffering, violence, and murder at times necessary; those decisions are care itself and care is troubled.
A 17th-century astronomer, an 18th-century doctor, a 19th-century whaler, and a 20th-century farmer discover an exquisite work of art… it turned out to be a f(l)ake.
By developing a blueprint of cultural modelling, the environmental humanities can uniquely combine the abstraction of data with the affective dimensions of experience.
Is there an insurmountable conflict between environmental protection and the liberal state philosophy? Do we have to choose between a sustainable future and our (personal and social) freedom?
Barbed wire created spaces of lethal and non-lethal violence. Where was it present, and how did it affect ecosystems and societies? Which life forms profited and which suffered under its intended and unintended effects?
How can we contribute to the further development of mobility education towards a more comprehensive and transformative approach?
Textual Framing and Research Bias in Current Economic Research” is a social sciences research project working under the interdisciplinary umbrella of the environmental humanities that seeks to scrutinise how frames influence and possibly distort the outcome of economic research on the environment. It works with economic research published between 2016 and today in top-ranked academic journals, such as Ecological Economics and Quarterly Journal of Economics.
If we understand technology in the context of the Anthropocene only through its technical aspects, we miss how modern technology is itself a social phenomenon that depends on a global ecologically unequal exchange of energy, labor time, land, and resources.
In the novels of Richard Powers there is no culture without nature, the choir of voices within creates a mosaic as complex as life.
Planting native trees has the potential to transform forest landscapes, but can it also transform forest narratives and practices in the Philippines?
My project aims to understand the aesthetics of contemporary landscapes by bringing together both theoretical and descriptive aesthetics and environmental artistic practises.
Political and Social Ecologies of Cooperative Housing Practices in Munich and Vienna
How do we tell the stories of the land through the struggle and resistance of its inhabitants? How should one belong to and empathize with an environment that is not pristine and green? How should we reimagine our intimacy with violated environments?
Subsidies are assumed to be good for farmers and agriculture but is this issue that straightforward? What is the cost of cheap food, and how is it paid for by the whole society and the environment? This research investigates the untold story of subsidies and their impact on human and environmental relations.
Food is frequently preserved in print. It follows that recipes reflect not only preparation methods but also culinary shifts in ecological sensibilities. Can they also contribute to future eating practices?
Eating invasive species has many potential benefits, from raising awareness and assisting in early detection and rapid response efforts to boosting the local economy. Now more than ever, it’s crucial to explore ways of eating that are conscious of ecosystems and climate change.
