Lena Schlegel

Qualifications

2025
Doctorate in Sociology, Lugwig-Maximilians-Universität München

2019
MA in Peace Studies and International Relations, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

2016
BA in Political Science, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

Career

From June 2025
Postdoctoral Researcher, Society-Environment Research Group
Department of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

2024
Research Assistant, European University Alliance for Global Health (EUGLOH)
Center for International Health, LMU Klinikum, Munich

2021-2025
Doctoral Programme ‚Environment and Society‘
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich

2020-2024
Doctoral Scholarship, Research Cluster ‚Socio-Ecological Transformation‘
Heinrich Böll Foundation

2022-2023
Visiting Researcher, ‚Melbourne Climate Futures Academy‘
School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne

2019-2021
Research Associate
International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW), Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

Leadership Roles

2021-2022
Speaker of the Doctoral Programme
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich

2016-2019
Student Speaker, Advisory Board for Sustainable Development
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

Awards

2021-2024
Doctoral Scholarship, Heinrich Böll Foundation

2019
Sustainability Award for Dissertations, University of Tübingen
for the MA Thesis „Decarbonising the Human: A posthumanist epistemic critique and more-than-human ethics for low-carbon transitions“

WiSe 2025/26:
Seminar ‚Qualitative Methoden in der Gesellschaft-Umweltforschung‘
MA Kulturgeographie, FAU Erlangen

Großes Geländeseminar: London/Wales (mit Sandra Jasper)
BA/LA/MA Kulturgeographie, FAU Erlangen

SoSe 2025:
Geländepraktikum
BA/LA Kulturgeographie, FAU Erlangen

WiSe 2023/24 & SoSe 2024:
Courses ‚One Health: Core Competencies‘ and ‚One Health and Climate Change‘
EUGLOH Certificate Programme, LMU Munich

WiSe 2021/22:
Seminar ‚Mensch-Natur-Beziehungen in der Weltgesellschaft‘
BA/MA Social Sciences, University of Augsburg

SoSe 2021:
Seminar ‚Contemporary Challenges for Global Governance at the Health-Climate Interface‘
BA/MA Political Science, University of Tübingen

Seminar ‚Eco-Anxiety und Klimaschmerz: Wie wir mit emotionalen Reaktionen auf die Klimakrise umgehen können‘
Certificate Programme ‚Studium Oecologicum‘, University of Tübingen

I) More-than-Human Geographies of Peri-Urban Spaces

A core thread of my research are more-than-human geographies, particularly those inspired by feminist and posthumanist theories. In the context of biodiversity loss as a fundamental but often overlooked global environmental crisis, I am interested in geographies of extinction, that is, the locally and culturally specific ways extinctions are known and addressed. While a lot of recent geographic work has engaged with biodiversity challenges in cities, peri-urban spaces have received less attention. However, in an urbanising world, urban fringes, operational, industrialised, abandoned, and fragmented landscapes emerge as sites of multispecies encounter and yield novel challenges, such as emerging disease, road trauma, displacement, and ecosystem change. Peri-urban spaces are therefore unique sites to study the emerging and neglected aspects of extinction—such as slow, local, or dark extinctions—as well as novel challenges for conservation: How and for whom should landscapes be managed? What hierarchies and baselines inform conservation actions? And how can humans make sense of their changing environments together with other species? Bringing together the interdisciplinary field of extinction studies with peri-urban geographies, I interrogate concepts of species, landscapes, and conservation in urbanising worlds. In particular, I focus on rethinking human relationships with, and responsibilities towards, animals considered ‚wildlife‘.

II) Disaster Geographies, particularly Wildfires

I am generally interested in nature-society relations and their transformation. In particular, I am curious about the cultural dimensions of societal responses to environmental challenges. I am especially interested in disasters as disruptive events that call into question the material and cultural underpinnings of  existing nature-society relations. In my PhD, I examined how meaning about, and responses to, environmental problems were negotiated in the aftermath of the 2019-20 ‚Black Summer‘ Bushfires in southeast Australia. Drawing on a critical perspective of multispecies care, I explored how orientations and conflicts of care for other species and forest environments were negotiated in bushfire-affected communities in Victoria. I thereby contribute to an understanding of disasters as multispecies and relational events, connecting global problems with local environmental histories and particular socio-cultural configurations. Through my innovative mix of problem-centred interviews and immersive fieldwork across several bushfire-affected communities in East Gippsland between 2022 and 2023, I also advance methodological debates at the intersection of multispecies and multisensory studies. In particular, I innovate the use of photography as an ‚art of noticing‘ and multispecies storytelling. Highlighting its conceptual contribution to feminist and posthumanist theories of care, the results will be published as an academic monograph under the title “Conflicts of Care: A Multispecies Ethnography of the Australian Black Summer”. Beyond my PhD research, I have also worked in EU- and BMBF-funded projects on disaster management, in particular on disaster response and prevention, the overlapping and cascading effects, and unequal impacts and vulnerabilities of disasters.

III) Affective Geographies

Another core focus of my research is the role of emotions and embodied experience for nature-society relations. In particular, I am interested how emotions animate environmental knowledge, orientation, and agency. Combining insights from environmental sociology and cultural geography, I explore how emotions affect responses to, and disengagement from, environmental problems, and how they interrelate with social norms and values. For instance, in the context of my PhD, I found that the most radical forms of action often came from a place of grief rather than hope, and that emotion norms acted to suppress politicisations of environmental loss. Action animated by place-based emotions such as solastalgia revealed the deep relationality between humans, other species, and their shared environments. At the same time, the paralysing effects of guilt over past wrongs and anxiety for uncertain futures reveal troubling temporalities underlying affective responses to the climate crisis. By offering an understanding of environmental knowledge as affective and embodied, I thereby advance the understanding of the relationship between knowledge and action. Through a radically relational account, my work thereby bridges long-standing debates over the relationship between individual agency and broader structures, knowledge and behaviour. Therefore, my work on emotions is also relevant for wider questions of social theory, such as the mechanisms of social (in)action, knowledge production, and affective polarisation.

IV) Multispecies Health and Justice

As public health emergencies are on the rise around the globe simultaneous with environmental disasters, the interconnectedness of environmental, animal and human health is increasingly scrutinised in both academic and political debates. Concepts like Global Health, One Health, or Planetary Health seek to grasp those interconnections, but remain, at large, anthropocentric. At the same time, recent advances in environmental ethics and multispecies studies prompt us to rethink moral and political hierarchies of species and highlight the fundamental entanglements of all life. My work brings together recent discussions of global/planetary health with insights from environmental ethics, animal studies, and multispecies justice. In addition to practical work experience in environmental epidemiology and global health education, I critically engage with concepts and governance models at the health-environment interface. In particular, I have critically examined the role of anthropocentrism in perpetuating environmental injustices and their intersections with other vulnerabilities. In addition, I work on expanding the scope of environmental valuation towards relational perspectives and multispecies accounts of health and justice.

Photography

In my research, I employ photography not just for illustrative or documentary purposes, but also as a methodological sensitivity and additional level of representation of nonhuman subjects and multispecies relations.