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

Sub-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. Rather than assuming fixed patterns or manifestations of an intertwined social and ecological polycrisis, 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 these relations?
We address these questions through a wide range of research topics—from more-than-human relations with animals and microorganisms in cities 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 anthropogenic environments as more-than-human archives through which the diverse political relations and cultural meanings of environments in the planetary crisis 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. Drawing on these discussions, we examine how diverse human and more-than-human agencies shape environments.
We place particular emphasis on the role of different knowledge cultures and forms of representing, transforming, and governing environments within the context of the planetary crisis. Our empirically grounded approach to research combines social 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, the integration of natural science techniques into social research, and 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

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...

Vom 30. September bis 2. Oktober 2025 fand in Augsburg die Jahrestagung „Neue Kulturgeographie (NKG)“ statt – diesmal unter dem Leitmotiv „Speculative Geographies of the New Climate Regime“. Die Tagung brachte erneut zahlreiche Forschende aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum zusammen, um aktuelle theoret...

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...