Society-Environment Research Group

Welcome!

Our research group is situated at the intersection of Cultural Geography and Nature-Society Geography with a shared curiosity for embodied, multisensory, and evidentiary fieldwork methods of studying and representing more-than-human worlds. We are an interdisciplinary and multilocal team with expertise in cultural and urban geography, anthropology, sociology, historical urban studies, spatial planning, toxicology and environmental microbiology.

Our team

Focus-team: »Rural Change & Development«

Our research

At the core of our work lies the situated description and critical analysis of urban environments, landscapes, and infrastructures in the context of planetary crises.
We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the societal challenges of the planetary ‘polycrisis’ spanning climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and threats to global health. Rather than assuming fixed patterns or manifestations, we seek to examine planetary crises as situated geographical phenomena. How do planetary crises manifest in urban and landscape ecologies? How are these local ecologies connected to global environmental transformations? What political, cultural, and ethical constellations shape environmental change?
We address these questions through a wide range of research topics—from societal relations with animals and microorganisms to issues of pollution, toxicity, and planetary health. Current projects focus on water and wastewater infrastructures, wildfires and disaster geographies, urban biodiversity, and bioacoustics. At the same time, we investigate material geographies as more-than-human archives through which political relations and cultural meanings become visible.
Conceptually, our work builds on debates in cultural geography—particularly in more-than-human geographies, feminist and posthuman geographies, critical landscape and sound studies—urban political ecology, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and critical social science research on infrastructures.
We place particular emphasis on the role of different knowledge cultures and forms of representing, transforming, and governing environments within the context of planetary crises. Our empirically grounded approach to research combines social science and humanities-based analyses with approaches from the natural sciences, while maintaining a critical reflection on the latter. Methodologically, we employ a wide range of qualitative social science methods and extend them through multimodal and experimental formats, including documentary film, sound recording, strolling as a research practice, and other transdisciplinary approaches.

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: Socio-microbial relations and urban water metabolism in the bacterial city
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

Dieser Vortrag rückt die Perspektiven lokaler Akteur:innen in den Mittelpunkt und fragt am Beispiel kleiner und mittlerer Kommunen in Mitteldeutschland: Wie wird der Klimawandel vor Ort wahrgenommen, eingeordnet und politisch bearbeitet? Mit einem akteurszentrierten, wahrnehmungsbasierten Ansatz leistet der Vortrag einen Beitrag zu einem differenzierten Verständnis lokaler Klimaanpassung und zeigt auf, welche spezifischen Herausforderungen und Handlungsbedarfe sich insbesondere für kleinere und mittlere Kommunen ergeben.

Auszeichnung mit dem Münchner Nachhaltigkeitspreis Für ihre Dissertation „Caring for Climate Change: Reconfiguring Human-Nature Relations in Light of the Australian Black Summer” wurde Dr. des. Lena Schlegel am 26.02.2026 mit dem Münchner Nachhaltigkeitspreis ausgezeichnet. Der von der Selbach U...

Annual Research Retreat of the Society-Environment Research Group Right next to the Kalksee in Brandenburg, our group gathered for its second retreat. We came together to exchange our ongoing research, reflect on each other’s ideas, and offer feedback across a wide range of topics, including the...

Field Class with Marie Duchêne and Dr. des. Lena Schlegel In Lena Schlegel's advanced MA class, we took a deep dive into qualitative methods of society-environment research. In addition to qualitative interviews and ethnographic research, we found there is much more, such as multisensory approac...

2026 startet das Exzellenzcluster „Transforming Human Rights“ an der FAU. Mit einer mehrjährigen Förderung aus Bundes- und Landesmitteln untersucht eine interdisziplinäre Gruppe von Wissenschaftler*innen, in welcher Weise grundlegende Megatrends wie die Autokratisierung, eine zunehmend fragmentiert...

In the days between summer and fall, with sunny mornings and rainy afternoons (see photo 1), our team came together for a first field trip to London. © Marie Duchêne, photo 1 Experimental Archives Conference, Kingston University Our first stop was the interdisciplinary Experimental Archive...