CITYINDUSTRIES - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Durham

is a social anthropologist working on urban anthropology and the anthropology of time. He currently is an assistant professor in Social Anthropology at Durham University. His work focuses on time, sustainability and urban development in postindustrial Europe. His first monograph Back to the Postindustrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City (2018, Berghahn) investigates the effects of severe population shrinkage in the German city of Hoyerswerda. It documents how the inhabitants of a city "without a future" regain their futures, providing the first ethnography of a shrinking city and new approaches to the anthropological study of the future. He is currently writing his second monograph, Urban Sustainability and the Future: An Anthropological Investigation of a ‘Climate City' in Crisis. This explores the efforts of Bremerhaven, another postindustrial German city, to make itself sustainable in the wake of Germany's recent halt in its transition to renewable energies. He has co-edited a special issue on ‘Time-Tricking' (2016, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology), and published various journal articles and book chapters. He has also been interviewed by The New York Times, The Guardian and Die Zeit. In Hoyerswerda he was involved with various outreach activities, including the AnthroCamp, a research camp for urban youth in Hoyerswerda (video here); and the Malplatte sociocultural art project (short film here).In Bremerhaven he is involved with applied projects on climate change and CO2 reduction (interviews on these projects here).