Once a major centre of heavy industries in Europe, Germany’s Ruhr Valley is transitioning into a postcarbon, climate-adjusted ecology and economy. Scholars studying the Ruhr’s “great transformation” as well as key actors in this transformation readily acknowledge that the return of nature above ground depends on the high-tech management of …
In this public session of the Lab, we will be discussing Melanie Garland’s ideas for her upcoming research project. The project reimagines maritime heritage by tracing the colonial, ecological, and cultural resonances of the German–Chilean saltpeter trade, carried by German sailing ships across the 19th century, and its links to …
In this public guest lecture, Marisol Marini (University of São Paulo) will discuss and illuminate the foundations that led to the development of the idea of the Common Body as a diagnostic and fabulative tool in the face of socio-environmental conflicts. The proposition of the Common Body aims to highlight …
Tülin Fidan, a research associate at the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven and member of the Lab, will be talking about: Tracing dumped munitions in the North Sea In this talk, I will follow the traces of dumped munitions in the North Sea. After WWII, it is estimated that around …
On November 14, 2025, the world lost one of its most powerful voices for disability justice. Alice Wong, writer, activist, and founder of the Disability Visibility Project, passed away at the age of 51 after battling an infection. Alice’s legacy is defined by her fierce commitment to centering the stories …
Members of LAEHR and the IRI THESys are now part of a new international partnership between collaborating researchers from Prague, Vienna, and Berlin on the subject Anthropocene Ruptures: Crossing Borders, Building Connections. The goal of the project is two thematic workshops dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational discussions on the Anthropocene …
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 …
10 July, 2025, 10:15 – 11:45 a.m., hybrid @IfEE room 408 & on zoom The Lab welcomes Aseela Haque, a doctoral researcher at the Deapartment of Geography, Freie Universität Berlin, for her talk: Interstitial ecologies: Everyday cosmopolitics of pigeon-human inhabitation in the urban margins Focusing on road interstices in Karachi as …
03 July, 2025, 10:15 – 11:45 a.m., hybrid @IfEE, room 408 & on Zoom The Lab welcomes Hilal Alkan, a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin), for her talk: Plant Companions: Affordances of anthropomorphism in migrants’ lives Based on ethnographic research with Turkish migrants in Berlin, this talk focuses …
