Marie Duchêne

Qualifications

2022
M.A. in Historical Urban Studies, Technische Universität Berlin (GER)
Thesis: ‘The waste pickers of Paris. A second life for people and resources?’

2018
B.A. in Franco-German Studies: Cross-border communication and cooperation, Universität des Saarlandes (GER) & Université de Lorraine (FR)
Thesis: ‘Eating habits and the construction of gender’

Career

From April 2025
Doctoral Researcher in AHRC-DFG funded project ‘Networked through Sound: Listening to 20th Century Wildlife Sound Archives’
Department of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

2022-2025
Research Associate
Chair of Planning and Construction Economics/Real Estate, Institute of Architecture, Technische Universität Berlin

2021-2025
Women’s and Equal Opportunities Officer
Faculty VII Business and Management, Technische Universität Berlin

Leadership Role

Journal article (peer-reviewed)

Akyildiz, Aylin/ Duchêne, Marie/ Ba, Claudia: „Researching resident responses to New Urban Tourism in Berlin: challenges of interviewee acquisition with a focus on ethnic minorities”. In: Journal of Qualitative Research in Tourism. 2020, Vol. 1(1), p. 121 – 130.

Chapter in an edited volume

Duchêne, Marie/ Vatter, Christoph: „Mann – Frau – Tier – BEEF!? Genderkonstruktionen und Fleischkonsum im Männer-Foodmagazin BEEF! in interkultureller Perspektive“. In: Doris G. Eibl/ Christoph Vatter (Ed.): Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen in den frankophonen Kulturen, Literaturen und Medien. Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 2020, p. 121 – 141.

Wastescapes
Winter Semester 2024/25
Seminar at Technische Universität Berlin

Seminar for students of Architecture (M.Sc.) with the goal of understanding the connection between the city and waste and getting an introduction on qualitative research methods.

Walk along the City – Perceiving, questioning and exploring the qualities of urban spaces
Winter Semester 2023/24 & Summer Semester 2025
X-Student Research Group, funded by Berlin University Alliance

Research seminar for students of Architecture (M.Sc.), Landscape Architecture (M.Sc.) and Historical Urban Studies (M.A.) with the goal of developing research questions on the topic of housing quality in a large housing estate through city strolls. Co-teaching with Aylin Akyildiz, TU Berlin. Results can be listened to as an audio guide.

I) Sonic Geographies
My PhD project, embedded in the project ‘Networked through Sound: Listening to 20th Century Wildlife Sound Archives’ funded by the AHRC-DFG Funding Initiative in the Humanities (2025-28), will focus on The British Library’s Wildlife and Environmental Sound (WES) collection (London, UK), the Animal Sound Archive (ASA) at The Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin, Germany) and the National Museum of Natural History’s Sonothèque (Paris, France).

Besides the predominant role of natural scientists in contributing sound recordings to the collections, these archives hold numerous collections of hobbyists and enthusiasts, especially female sound recordists, who contributed to the archives but have thus far gained little recognition. Furthermore, local experts guiding European wildlife sound recordists to find ‘unknown’ places and species on their recording expeditions have been erased in the retelling of wildlife sound recording. In my PhD project I will focus on these hidden and marginalized forms of expertise. Furthermore, I will investigate how urban environments play a role in the production and consumption of wildlife recordings.

II) Waste Studies
Waste has shaped our existence for centuries and is omnipresent in cities. I am interested in investigating how and what is defined as waste in different cultural, social and political systems. In my Master Thesis I focused on marginalized expertise of Parisian waste pickers, who operate at the intersection of formality and informality by collecting and reselling solid waste on self-organized markets.

AHRC-DFG funded project ‘Networked through Sound: Listening to 20th Century Wildlife Sound Archives’
See also Team Profile: Society-Environment Research Group