Newsletter of the DFG Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies "Futures of Sustainability"

Juneseo Hwang, PhD: “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening”. I have centred ecological justice at the core of my work and investigated generative mechanisms that promote/constrain sustainable peace and ecological security. My current research explains peace and security implications of the global movement to criminalise ecocide. To make our planet more habitable, I have been active in advocacy campaigns for the rights of nature, the law of ecocide, and everyday peace.

Philipp Jacobi: I am a trained political theorist who is currently moving more in the direction of empirical research. My research is based on the assumption that modern societies should learn to be less anthropocentric. But how? As Anna Tsing says: "It takes concrete histories to make any concept come to life". I collect these stories as a multispecies ethnographer in the northernmost parts of Sweden, also known as Sápmi, focussing on reindeer and the role they play in various land use struggles.

Lea Kammler: I have an interdisciplinary background in environmental sciences and sustainability science with a specialization in governance. In the course of my PhD project, I am investigating the discourse of “just transitions” towards a low-carbon society with a particular focus on the role of power and (political) inequalities in energy transitions.

Macario Lacbawan, PhD: I am an anthropologist interested in the entanglement of sustainability, life, disposability, and the environment. My work examines the types of indigenous life envisioned and deemed disposable as governments in Southeast Asia construct sustainable spaces to address contemporary and future consequences of climate change.

Cassiopea Staudacher: With a background in social sciences, I explore the intricate interplay of materiality, time, and sociality that shapes specific ideas and pathways of social transformations in my PhD project titled 'Time for Sustainability? Contestations of the Modern Temporal Regime.' My research spans general and cultural sociology, sociological theories, environmental sociology, and the sociology of time.

Prof. Dr. Frank Adloff: In the face of multiple ecological crises and catastrophes, I explore what a different form of living together, a future conviviality, could look like and what is structurally opposed to it. What characterizes today's social relationships with nature, what could a social-ecological transformation look like and what other - collaborative - approach to nature do we need for this?

Prof. Dr. Christine Hentschel: My current work at the Centre is dedicated to catastrophic and visionary collective imaginaries in the Anthropocene from a sociological and cultural studies perspective. Throughout my research I seek to understand how societies make sense of deep planetary insecurity and how they relate to a future of loss – affectively, strategically and practically. This includes work on collapsological reasoning, emerging protest movements, right-wing thought and sentiment, as well as government and community plans to prepare for a future of increasing uninhabitability.

Prof. Dr. Stefan C. Aykut: I am a sociologist and science and technology studies scholar interested in ecological crises, conflicts and transformations. In my work, I combine ethnographies of global climate politics and process analytical studies on the societal dynamics of low-carbon transformations, to better understand how ecological problems challenge and reconfigure modern societies.

Still on board (if you were wondering): Prof. Dr. Sighard Neckel (Senior Permanent Fellow), Dr. Sarah Lenz (Research Associate), Peter Wibbeling (Scientific Manager), Eva von Staden (Project Coordinator)

Prof. Vando Borghi, PhD (Sociologist, Università di Bologna)
affiliated via Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) at Universität Hamburg

Pierre Charbonnier, PhD (Philosopher, SciencesPo, Paris)

Prof. Yifei Li, PhD (Sociologist, NYU Shanghai)

Writers in Residence:

Alexa Höber (TV Journalist, Hamburg)

Sara Schurmann (Freelance journalist, author and journalism trainer)

We are very proud to announce that our Research Associate Macario Lacbawan has been awarded the 2023 Westinska prize for outstanding PhD dissertation in the humanities by the Royal Society of Humanists in Uppsala (Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala) for his doctoral thesis, titled "The Burden of Responsibility: Predicaments of Environmental Life in the Caraballo Mountains, Northern Philippines". Macario conducted a year of anthropological fieldwork among the Ikalahan people of the northern Philippines to document what happens when the legal recognition of a group as an indigenous group simultaneously requires them to turn their traditional land into a nature reserve.

Adloff, Frank (2024): "Trajectories of Post-Sustainability", in: International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. 17 p., Link
 
Adloff, Frank (2024): "Politiken der Post-Nachhaltigkeit oder der Kampf um eine konviviale Zukunft, in: "Kann das Anthropozän gelingen? Krisen und Transformationen der menschlichen Naturverhältnisse im interdisziplinären Dialog", Mitscherlich-Schönherr, O., Cojocaru, M-D. & Reder, M. (eds.). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, Vol. 4., p. 242-257 , 16 p. (Grenzgänge; Vol. 4). Link

Adloff, Frank (2023): "Konvivialismus als öffentliche Soziologie", in: Stefan Selke et al. (ed.): "Handbuch Öffentliche Soziologie". Wiesbaden: Springer VS, p. 363-371, Link

Adloff, Frank (2023): "Neue Kollektive: Konvivialität über Speziesgrenzen hinaus", in: Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft. 9, 2, p. 113-134, 21 p., Link

Adloff, Frank (2023): "Ontology, Conviviality and Symbiosis or: Are there Gifts of Nature?", in: MAUSS international. 3, 1, p. 154-175 21 p., Link

Adloff, F. and Degens, P. (eds.) (2023): Special Issue "Kollektivität und Konvivialität", in: Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft. 9, 2, Link

Adloff, F. and Degens, P. (2023): "Editorial", in: Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft. 9, 2, p. 5-14 10 p., Link

Altstaedt, Sören (2023): "Future-cultures: How future imaginations disseminate throughout the social", in: European Journal of Social Theory. 19 p., Link

Degens, Philipp (2023): "Solidarische Landwirtschaft als konviviale Ökonomie", in: Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft. 9, 2, p. 51-80, 30 p., Link

Fladvad, Benno (2023): "Frieden durch Dekarbonisierung? Kolumbiens Energiewende und ihre Schattenseiten.", in: W&F Wissenschaft und Frieden, 4/2023, p. 20-23, Link

Fladvad, Benno (2023): "Infrastructuring environmental (in)justice: green hydrogen, Indigenous sovereignty and the political geographies of energy technologies.", in: Geographica Helvetica, 78, p. 493–505, Link

Grillmayr, J. and Hentschel C. (2023): „World without Humans, Humans without World: Apocalyptic Passions in the Anthropocene“, in: "Worlds Ending. Ending Worlds", J. Stümer and M. Dunn (eds.), De Gruyter, p. 209-226, Link

Hentschel, Christine (2023): „Edgework in post/apokalyptischen Zeiten“, Soziopolis, 27. September 2023, Link

Hentschel, Christine (2023): „Im Sog der Flut. Die rechte Koproduktion der Katastrophe“, in: Wellgraf, S. and Hentschel, C. (eds.), "Rechtspopulismen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Irritationen". Spector Books, Leipzig, p. 120-135, Link

Neckel, Sighard (2023): "Klimakonflikte. Chancen und Hindernisse eines sozial-ökologischen Wandels", in: Berliner Debatte Initial BDI. 34, 3, p. 5-11, Link