Society-Environment Research Group

Welcome! The research group will start in January 2025. Stay tuned for updates!

Our team

Sub-Team: »Rural Change & Development«

Our research

…will be explained soon!

Our research projects

DFG Cluster of Excellence
Matters of Activity. Image Space Material
The Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« aims to create a basis for a new culture of materials. The central vision of the Cluster is to rediscover the analog in the activity of images, spaces and materials in the age of the digital. Biology and technology, mind and material, nature and culture intertwine in a new way.

Cluster Webpage
Experimental Setting „Blasted Landscapes“

DFG-AHRC
Networked through Sound: Listening to 20th Century Wildlife Sound Archives
In the twentieth century, wildlife sound archives emerged as new sites of specialist scientific data sets, primarily as repositories of recordings for bioacoustics research and as reference libraries for the identification of species by scientific taxonomists and wildlife enthusiasts. »Networked through Sound« investigates the emergence of a network of seven wildlife sound archives initiated in the mid 20th century across Europe and South Africa. The primary objective of the project is to understand how this network of archives, and the sound recordings they are composed of, are produced and consumed across different social and cultural contexts.
Berlin University Alliance
Re-Scaling Global Health: Human Health & Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet
This project poses two interrelated questions: What do the concepts of global and Planetary Health mean for the development of cities? And, related to that, how can we rethink the urban through a multispecies lens when it comes to questions of health and disease? Our consortium brings together an interdisciplinary team of urban scholars with ecologists and virologists to work towards advancing a theory and practice of multispecies urbanism that understands the environment not as a passive backdrop but as an active agent co-producing urban space and urban health.

Webpage Research Consortium
Urban Lab „Planetary Tactics“


DFG Walter-Benjamin
Polluted Rivers, Infrastructure, and the Politics of Multispecies Health in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The project studies urban water pollution as a problem of the Anthropocene, where societies face the increasingly health-threatening urban ecologies they have coproduced. Technology plays a vital, but little explicitly studied, political role in how actors understand and address entwined environmental and health challenges in cities. Through a case study of urban river pollution and water supply in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the project explores the political role of technology and its relations with nonhuman life in producing and remaking unhealthy urban environments. Hereby, it aims to uncover how system-based approaches to urban nature–specifically planetary health–that become realized through technology, shape unhealthy urban environments and their governance.

Funding information

DFG Walter-Benjamin
MicroFlows: Exploring microbial agency in urban space
This project explores the roles that various microbial ecologies play in the co-constitution of urban rivers and their extended infrastructure in London and Berlin. This involves investigating 1) The metabolic and ecological dynamics of the socio-microbial nexus in the function of the urban hydrological cycle. 2) The embodied responses of microorganisms to historical patterns of pollution and their mobilisation as evidential matter. 3) The potential of participatory microbiology in fostering novel human-microbial relations in highly modified fluvial zones. The project draws on more-than-human geography, urban political ecology, critical physical geography, and environmental microbiology to develop a methodologically experimental and interdisciplinary project.

Funding information

Our progress

First Research Retreat of the Society-Environment Research Group Amid former military grounds, burnt forest and nature conservation sites, our team came together for the first time to get to know each other, explore shared research interests, plan upcoming projects, and define the common themes ...

Excursion of the MA Seminar 'Urban Natures in the Anthropocene' led by Prof. Dr. Sandra Jasper Together with our Master's students, we visited the nature conservation area 'Tennenloher Forst', a former military training ground just opposite the Institute of Geography. Thi...

A very warm welcome to our new team member Marie Duchêne, who joins our Society-Environment Research Group as a doctoral researcher! Over the next three years, Marie will work on the AHRC-DFG funded project »Networked through Sound: Listening to 20th Century Wildlife Sound Archives«, co-led...

Matter shapes our existence, although we tend to forget about its activity in everyday life. The __matter Festival 2025 shines a new light on material agencies. From April 10, 2025, it presents exhibitions, workshops and debates at twelve venues across Berlin, radically changing our understanding o...