I am a doctoral researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

My research interests are the co-production of coupled human-environment systems within knowledge processes, underlying assumptions and method choice in participatory environmental modelling, and philosophical implications of public engagement in science. My thesis working title is “Knowing and Making the Climate Citizen: On the Co-Production of Socio-Ecological Modelling and Social Order”.

Contact: krystin.unverzagt@hu-berlin.de

Find me also at: IRI THESys

More information on my doctoral research:
For several decades, Science Studies scholars emphasising the contingency and performativity of knowledge have promoted public engagement in science (PES). However, looking at PES practice, an analysis of project rationales and methods used in the field of participatory socio-ecological modelling points towards the persistence of different concepts of participation within public engagement practice. Project reports reproduce a positivist understanding of science and science-society relations alongside postmodern tendencies. Building on the notion of knowledge production as performative practice, I want to gain a more nuanced picture of what participatory research does in society, why participatory modelling is worth pursuing, and how it relates to processes of social ordering. I study the participatory research process as a social process of symbolic interaction in which ways of knowing the coupled human-environment system are interlinked with ways of producing it. Based on the idea of co-production, socio-ecological modelling is not only political as a site of environmental decision-making. We can widen our understanding of what it means to engage in a participatory scientific practice by inquiring into the ways in which epistemology and ontology – ways of modelling and of engaging stakeholders, and ideas on the nature of the system, the world, democracy, humans, and human-environment relations – are co-produced within participatory modelling processes. In order to trace out how social dynamics, power relations and epistemic processes around ‘socio-ecological systems’ feed into the making of those very systems, I do fieldwork in three participatory modelling projects. My data collection methods involve participant observation, ethnographic interviews, qualitative in-depth interviews, recording of speech events, and focus groups.

Publications

2020

Petra Beck, Patrick Bieler, Milena Bister, Adina Dymczyk, Janine Hauer, Anna Heitger, Dženeta Hodžić, Ruzana Liburkina, Stefan Reinsch, Tim Seitz, Christine Schmid, Krystin Unverzagt

Rezension zu: Groth, Stefan; Ritter, Christian (Hrsg.): Zusammen arbeiten. Praktiken der Koordination und Kooperation in kollaborativen Prozessen. Bielefeld 2019 Journal Article

In: H-Soz-Kult, 2020.

Links

2019

Sabine Biedermann, Patrick Bieler, Milena Bister, Sascha Cornejo Puschner, Adina Dymczyk, Dennis Eckhardt, Janine Hauer, Maren Heibges, Dženeta Hodžić, Jonna Josties, Martina Klausner, Anja Klein, Céline Lauer, Ruzana Liburkina, Jörg Niewöhner, Stefan Reinsch, Christine Schmid, Tim Seitz, Itzell Torres, Krystin Unverzagt, Jorge E. Vega-Marrot

Current work in the Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations: Doing research in a more-than-thought collective Journal Article

In: EASST Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2019.

Links

From the Collaboratory Social Anthropology & Life Sciences to the Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations Journal Article

In: EASST Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2019.

Links