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Thinking like a waste scholar
Waste is on top of my mind, although not always centre stage in every research project.
I was part of the initial steering group and now am a member of the research group waste in motion funded by the German Research Foundation. With Nicolas Schlitz I’ve co-edited a Special Issue on frictions in global recycling networks.
On a global scale, I am cooperating with the Disaster STS network and the European waste research group behind ‘Opening the Bin’.
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Engagement
I was a board member of stsing and contact person of their tech & infrastructure working group, from 2020 until 2023.
In 2019, there was an organizing workshop in Kassel, which I co-organized with Tanja Bogusz, Stefanie Büchner, Endre Dányi, Anja Klein, Martina Schlünder and Estrid Sørensen. Julie Mewes gives a report.
stsing is now an association whose mission is to strengthen Science & Technology Studies in the German-speaking world with new creative and critical methods.
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Interspecies Care
More-than-human research in the aftermath of the Corona crisis.
I have been researching public discourses on the meat industry and the culling of minks in a writing collective. The book is based on a cooperation with students. Building on an excellent seminar research report, we knitted a book together; thus the project also stands for an egalitarian (social) science that thinks across statuses.
Access the book here.
More on human-animal studies Beyond that, I have engaged with Cultured Meat in other animal-human research.
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Current Project
My main research theme right now is data centres: their local arrangement, material legacies, building procedures, and global production networks enabling its operation. The study is conducted in the collaborative research centre 1567 Virtual Life Worlds, in subproject A02 led by Estrid Sørensen.
So what’s the pitch of the project? As information infrastructures, data centres help shape scientific knowledge production. As consumers of raw materials and energy, they contribute to shaping natural processes.
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Train Infrastructures
Based on my (now concluded) work in the collaborative research centre in Siegen I contribute to the discussion on mobility transitions.
Abstract of the argument Climate change and environmental issues call for an ecological transformation of production and consumption. In Germany, the transport sector is considered the “troubled child” of the transformation, because emissions in the mobility sector have not fallen in recent decades, in contrast to other sectors. But there are signs of change – the car industry has been criticised since the “diesel scandal” and, alongside electric mobility, e-fuels and cycling, the rail industry is seen as a beacon of hope.
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Network valuation studies
I am part of the research group On the path to the valuation society? funded by the German Research Foundation. With Emma Greeson and Olli Pyyhtinen, I’ve co-edited a Special Issue on ‘Dis/Assembling Value’.
We’ve been meeting for several years and are preparing a handbook on Valuation and Society (Routledge).
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Ethnography
My central methodological competence: participant observation, immersion, following materials, expert knowledge and situated practices.
The qualitative, participatory lens is a research ethos for me, it involves participating in core practices of social actors, acquiring and reconstructing expert knowledge, and generally being creative with different sources of data.
Ethnography is a non-standardized research method in the social and cultural sciences, focusing on the collection of data, actors, perspectives, narratives, objects or curiosities.
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Coding
More hands-on skills: From Data Science to Graph Analysis.
In addition to qualitative, ethnographic methods, I work with digital research approaches. They enrich the qualitative analysis. I specialise in the analysis and preparation of public controversies. I work mainly with Gephi, Python and R and focus on data analytics. See also GitHub.
Generally speaking, I’m interested in open science and knowledge and love to experiment with software, seemingly wasting many hours on testing and deploying setups.
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E-Waste Dissertation Research
Global and interdisciplinary research on e-waste: ethnographic studies in Germany, India, and across social media platforms.
Key for this research is a book I published: Hightech at the end.
Hightech at the end examines the global recycling of electronic waste by studying multiple sites: ethnographic observations help unravel political negotiations on sustainability in India, the in-house value chain of a German recycling company is scrutinized, and a failed Google innovation is discussed.