The lab warmly congratulates (soon-to-be-Dr.) Anja Klein on finishing, submitting, and defending her PhD thesis on November 7th, 2025!
The title of Anja’s thesis is “Doing difference, materiality and complexity with simulation models: An ethnography of modeling social-ecological relations in interdisciplinary sustainability research.”
Abstract:
In the thesis, I explore the epistemological, ontological, and ethical dimensions of modelling in interdisciplinary sustainability research as a set of iterative and entangled material-semiotic knowledge practices. This is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork on the construction and use of statistical and numerical models of social-ecological relations in two research groups in Stockholm and Accra. How are these relations conceptualized and enacted in modelling practices, and how can a social and cultural anthropological engagement with such practices be a generative one?
This research was conducted in the research project “Situating complexity: an ethnography of modelling human-environment relations”, funded by the German Research Foundation, and hosted by the Institute for European Ethnology (HU Berlin) & IRI THEsys (HU Berlin).
The thesis was supervised by Jörg Niewöhner & Tobias Krüger. Ruzana Liburkina confirmed summa cum laude as external advisor.