Institute News
Winter Term 2025/26
Winter Term 2025/26
The Institute celebrates the recent publication of Dr. Katharina Graf, who co-edited the recently released book Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective, together with Anna Colquhoun. The volume came out on October 2025 from Berghahn. The book is packed with highly readable ethnographic chapters by renowned international food scholars who critically interrogate and challenge terroir or the notion that there is a fixed taste of place.
You can find the digital/open access version of the book here.
Full citation:
Colquhoun, Anna, and Graf, Katharina (eds). 2025. Food Beyond Terroir: Tasting Place and Placing Taste in Global Perspective. New York: Berghahn. Open Access: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ColquhounFood
Winter Term 2025/26
Dr. Tim Schütz, from University of California, Irvine, will be joining us for a Keynote Talk with the title "Archival Designs: Experimenting with Ethnographic Knowledge in Anthropology and STS" at KAEE Soiree 2025.
Abstract:
What is the role of anthropology and STS in times of crisis? My talk approaches that question by examining how environmental activists and movements design digital infrastructures in the context of both fast and slow industrial disasters. Drawing on fieldwork with activists in the United States, Taiwan, and Vietnam, I explore different forms of archival design and how they are animated through diverse collaborations — from field campuses to installations and digital collections. I then connect these insights to two ongoing projects, the Environmental Governance: Global Record and the Critical Cultural Theory Archive, both of which trace the role of scholarship amid intersecting crises and shifting disciplinary responses. I hope to open a conversation about how archival practice can become a tool for research, expression, and political engagement for the next generation of STS and anthropology students.
About the Speaker:
Tim Schütz is a social scientist, holding a PhD from the University of California, Irvine's Department of Anthropology and currently an independent researcher affiliated with UC Irvine's EcoGovLab. His research and teaching focus on the mobilization of data across scientific fields, its role as evidence in legal contexts, and its significance as a shared reference point in social movements.
He has recently completed his dissertation project Archival Designs and the Informating of Environmentalism, which explores the role of data and digital archives amidst the expansion of plastic and petrochemical production in the US, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Since 2020, he has been co-developing the Formosa Plastics Global Archive, a digital workspace supporting a transnational network of researchers and advocates concerned about the operations of the Formosa Plastics Group.
He studied Media, Communication, and Cultural Research in Bremen and Istanbul (BA) and Science and Technology Studies (MA) in Frankfurt. He has received scholarships from the Fulbright Foundation, German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes), Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Environmental Data Justice Fund (Windward Foundation).
He is also an active member of the Design Group for the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) and serves as open data editor for the journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.
You can find more about him here.
Winter Term 2025/26
Ben Anderson in conversation with Sophia Leipert and Florian Skelton, chair Julia Schubert.
When: Tuesday, October 21st, 2025, 6:15 to 7:45 p.m.
Where: Campus Westend, Seminarhaus, SH 1.101.
On October 21st Ben Anderson (Durham University) will present his most recent book, “The Politics of Feelings" , which he co-authored with his colleague Prof. Anna J. Secor (Durham University). Taking the 2008 financial crisis as a starting point, Anderson and Secor draw a comparison between the political events unfolding in the US and the UK. They identify populism, progressivism, and liberalism as structures of feelings — that is to say, as three “alternative ways of feeling and experiencing the present, investing the past and projecting the future". They thereby examine the affective orientations that shape race, class, and gender in contemporary societies, thus capturing well the moving and contradictory political predicament we are currently in.
Ben Anderson is a professor in the department of geography at Durham University and currently a Mercator fellow at the “Fixing Futures" research training group.
Sophia Leipert is a doctoral researcher in the “Fixing Futures" research training group at Goethe-University Frankfurt.
Julia Schubert is a postdoctoral researcher in the “Fixing Futures" research training group at Goethe-University Frankfurt.
Florian Skelton is a doctoral researcher in the “Fixing Futures" research training group at Goethe-University Frankfurt.
No registration is required.
No registration is required.
'Too much, too little': The politics of intensity in crisis times
Speaker: Prof. Ben Anderson
When: 23 October 2025, 16:15-17:45
Where: Campus Westend, PEG 1.G192
Abstract: Ben Anderson argues that amid the multiple ends and afterlives of neoliberalism in the UK and USA post the 2008 financial crisis we are witnessing a 'crisis of intensity', a crisis of whether life feels too much or too little. Crises of intensity are recurrent features of twentieth century capitalism and have four components: a disjuncture between actual experience and desired experience; judging the present in terms of 'too much' and/or 'too little'; a diagnosis of the present in terms of 'maladies of intensity' (such as burnout or outrage); and the proliferation of promises of 'good intensity' (from new types of relaxation through to the excitement of extreme sports).After giving examples of past crises of intensity articulated with the end of the Fordist settlement and expressed through claims of boredom, he will show how contemporary right-wing populism is simultaneously symptom, cause, and promised resolution to a crisis of intensity marked by the indeterminacy of whether life should feel 'more' or 'less'. As well as showing how this promised resolution is articulated with a series of right wing adjacent online cultures, he will speculate on the implications of this present crisis of intensity for transformations in capitalism and the futures of populism.
