Marine Social & Cultural Sciences

Marine-Human Relations

The Social and Cultural Sciences Strategy Group provides a forum for a very diverse community of scientists who are concerned with the ever-increasing impact of humans on the marine ecosystem and the impact of these changes on humans.

Latest News

Man and Sea – Conversation with Tanja Bogusz

People and the sea - How do you tell the story of a catastrophe without an event?

Marine STS Group – Website now online

The group is open to all scientists who are interested in marine social sciences and the Blue Humanities interest.

Marine Social Sciences and Humanities in Politically Challenging Times

Annual Meeting of the KDM/DAM Strategy Group for Social Sciences and Humanities at the Marine Science Campus

Marine STS Group – Website now online

The group is open to all scientists who are interested in marine social sciences and the Blue Humanities interest.

Human and Sea – Conversation with Tanja Bogusz

People and the sea - How do you tell the story of a catastrophe without an event?

Call for Papers | Social & Cultural Sciences

Call for papers & Call for participation for the Autumn Meeting of the KDM Strategy Group Social Science & Humanities

The sea is being used more and more intensively by mankind and is thus becoming more and more significant. Whether in terms of traditional uses, such as food production, shipping routes and coastal development, or in terms of new uses, e.g. as a sink for carbon dioxide, through diving tourism, aquarium trade or deep-sea mining. Thus, humans also have an ever greater influence on the marine ecosystem and anthropogenic pressure on coasts and seas is steadily increasing. The increase in importance is also reflected in the increase in political attempts at regulation and negotiation processes at national, regional and international level. The recently published EU communication ‘International Ocean Governance: An Agenda for the Future of our Oceans’ illustrates this once again.

In this respect, the need to scientifically survey and analytically reflect on governance mechanisms, social forms of organisation and visions of the future related to the sea and its resources is also steadily increasing. This is also expressed in the increasing demand for corresponding social and cultural science expertise – especially on the part of policy-making, science management and international non-governmental organisations. The members of this strategy group contribute with their expertise to the processing of current questions.

The following four thematic areas are the focus of our interest:

Marine governance for sustainable development
Marine & coastal transformation research
Social-ecological & technological systems analysis
Marine Peace and Conflict Research

A story map of selected research topics and projects of the strategy group

In German In English

Members

Businessporträts | ©KDM
Tanja Bogusz leitet den Arbeitsbereich Makrosoziologie und Soziologische Wissenschaftsforschung am Institut für Soziologie der Leibniz-Universität Hannover. Mit ihrem Projekt „Soziologie des Meeres. Eine Untersuchung europäischer Küstendynamiken im Anthropozän“ wurde sie 2024 in das Heisenberg-Programm der DFG aufgenommen.

Research interests:

Marine Social Sciences

Science Studies

Cultures of knowledge

Social and societal theories

Collaborative research methods

Zur Website
©KDM
Annegret Kuhn is a political scientist at CAU Kiel and a member of Kiel Marine Science. Her research interests focus on the influence of international institutions and norms of climate and marine policy on socio-economic and environmental challenges of a globally increasing use of natural resources. In particular, her current research examines the ways in which the political participation of different groups of actors in international organisations and regimes can promote sustainable governance of marine resources and ecosystems. The regional focus of her empirical research is the Baltic Sea region and the Arctic region.

Research interests:

Multi-level ocean governance and sustainable development

International climate and maritime policy organisations

Political knowledge integration

Public participation

Zur Website
Achim Schlüter is Professor of Social Systems and Ecological Economics at Jacobs University and Head of the Institutional and Behavioural Economics Group at the Centre for Tropical Marine Research. He is mainly interested in institutions in the sense of rules that make it possible to manage the coast and the sea in an economically, socially and ecologically sustainable way. To this end, it is central to understand the behaviour of people within these institutions. These aspects are considered in the working group in various areas, such as aquaculture, marine pollution, sea level rise, tourism or fisheries. Methodologically, essentially qualitative or experimental research approaches are pursued.

Research interests:

Institutions (rules) for the sustainable use of tropical marine coastal ecosystems and their transformation

Emergence and promotion of cooperation in the shared use of the coast and the sea

Behaviour of people as central actors in the socio-ecological system of coast and sea

Website
Research interests:

Fishers´ and fishing behaviour

Biographical research

Structural change in fisheries

Fisheries Discourses

Stakeholder engagement

Website
Anna Lena Bercht is a human geographer with a background in psychology. She works in the Department of Geography at CAU Kiel and is an associate member of the Disaster Research Unit at the Freie University of Berlin. From 2015 to 2018, Anna Lena was a visiting researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) at Stockholm University. Anna Lena’s research lies at the interface of geography and psychology with a focus on human-environment relationships, climate justice and psychological barriers to behaviour change. Employing qualitative research methods, she has engaged in fieldwork in China, Norway and Germany. Her most recent funded research projects examine barriers to climate adaptation and address climate communication.

Research interests:

Psychological barriers to climate change adaptation

Environmental and climate justice

Climate communication

Coastal fisheries

Arctic, Northern Germany

Website
Sven Bergmann is a cultural anthropologist and research assistant at the German Maritime Museum in Bremen. His post-doctoral project focuses on the problematisation of plastic in the sea and its entanglements with emerging cultures of nature such as the plastisphere. The research explores how microplastics have been raised as a scientific and social problem. The research is a contribution to an anthropology of the speculative and of uncertain futures, temporalities and ecologies. In it, plastic is conceived as an ongoing experiment with an as yet unknown afterlife.

Research interests:

Marine and Environmental Anthropology

Science and technology research

Political economies and ecologies of waste, pollution and toxicity

Infrastructures, urban and regional change

Kinship, Reproduction and the Body

Website
Annette Breckwoldt is an interdisciplinary marine scientist and project leader of the German side of the bi-national French-German (ANR/DFG) research project SOCPacific (‘A Sea of Connections: contextualising fisheries in the South Pacific region’, with anthropologist Dr Elodie Fache on the French side). She is also a visiting scientist for ‘science-stakeholder interaction processes’ at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven. Annette’s PhD (2007) focused on interdisciplinary aspects of community-based fisheries management in traditional Fijian fishing grounds. Annette is a member of the Steering Committee of the IGU ‘Commission on Islands’, Co-Chair of the Human Dimension Working Group of IMBeR (Integrated Marine Biosphere Research; imber.info), and Associate Editor for the journal Frontiers in Marine Science (section ‘Marine Conservation and Sustainability’).

Research interests:

Science-Stakeholder Interactions

Integrated coastal management

Small-scale fisheries systems

Local realities in the use and management of marine resources

Environmental and development aspects of island states

Environmental perceptions

Inter- and transdisciplinarity: interfaces ecology / social sciences / human geography / environmental psychology

Website
Antje Bruns is Professor of Human Geography (University of Trier) and Head of the Governance & Sustainability Lab. She researches and teaches on the geographies of socio-ecological crises in the Anthropocene and the gaps and blind spots of previous solutions. Antje Bruns positions herself along critical theoretical approaches (political ecology, post- and decolonial theory), which she interweaves with the analysis of alternative practices in order to reflect on transformation and socio-ecological justice.

Research interests:

Political ecology of the coast

Urbanisation and coastal cities

Sustainability, governance and transformation

Qualitative methods

Website
Rebecca Demmler is a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the Department of Sustainability Science and Applied Geography at the University of Greifswald. She studies the individual, psychological, social, and collective dimensions of sustainable behavior, as well as the incentives and barriers to its implementation, with a particular focus on human-environment relationships in marine ecosystems.

Research interests:

Factors influencing environmental attitudes and behavior

Moral disengagement and emotions related to environmentally harmful behavior

Incentives for personal and collective transformation toward sustainable action

Promoting understanding of the interdependent relationship between humans and marine ecosystems (ocean literacy)

Website
Kira Gee has been working at Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht since June 2015. She has many years of experience in maritime spatial planning (MSP) and has worked in various international MSP projects in the Baltic Sea and the European Atlantic, most recently in the BONUS BALTSPACE and GIZ MARISMA projects. Her current research focuses on socio-cultural and international dimensions of maritime spatial governance, as well as marine space as such, including perceptions of the sea by different actors, the sea as space and place, and individual values. Kira Gee is a member of the ICES Working Group on Marine Planning and Coastal Zone Management (WGMPCZM) and the BSH Scientific Advisory Group on the update of the ROP EEZ.

Research interests:

Socio-cultural dimensions of maritime spatial planning

Sustainable marine development

Transnational Maritime Policy

Perception of the sea as space and place

Maritime values and value systems

Website
Charlotte Gehrke works at IDOS in Bonn. Her work focuses on the intersection of science communication, politics, and diplomacy, with an empirical emphasis on polar and maritime policy.

Research interests:

Governance

Polar Policy (Arctic, Antarctic)

Discourses and Policies on Species Conservation, with a Focus on Marine Mammals

Scientific Communication and Diplomacy

Website
Research associate at the artec Research Centre for Sustainability at the University of Bremen and head of the research project “Nitrogen management in the making – Material practices and policies”. She is co-founder of the Bremen NatureCulture Lab (www.naturenkulturen.de) and author of the book “Working with Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand-An Ethnography of Coastal Protection” (Bielefeld: transcript 2016). She works at the intersection of cultural anthropology, human geography and STS. In 2015, she completed her PhD in the international DFG Research Training Group INTERCOAST (University of Bremen and University of Waikato) with a qualitative analysis of soft coastal protection practices. In 2012/2013 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Program at Harvard University.

Research interests:

Political ecologies of the coast

Co-production of nature and society

Nitrogen management

Science and Technology Studies (STS)

Qualitative methods / praxeography

Website
Ramona Hägele is a research assistant at IDOS and a PhD student at the University of Bonn. After graduating in social and cultural anthropology and political science, she is currently doing her PhD in the sociology of knowledge. She is investigating processes of interdisciplinary and transcultural knowledge production in marine carbon observations with a focus on the Baltic Sea, the North Atlantic and the Brazilian coast. Her research is situated at the intersection of STS, political geography and social anthropology. Previously, she worked on (local) water governance, ethnic minorities and intra-state conflicts with a regional focus on the Middle East and East Asia.

Research interests:

Interdisciplinary and transcultural knowledge production in marine carbon observations

Ethnography

(Marine) Science and Technology Research

Travel of Knowledges

Website
Jochen Hinkel (Dr habil.) is an institutional economist, heads the Adaptation and Social Learning Department at the Global Climate Forum and teaches as a private lecturer at the Chair of Resource Economics at the Thaer Institute of the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on decision-making, finance and governance in the face of climate risks and the associated societal changes. Hinkel has contributed as lead author on these topics to the last two Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and is currently co-leading the work on coastal decision-making in the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).

Research interests:

Coastal climate adaptation and governance

Understanding institutional/political change through mixed theories from institutional economics and political science

Supporting coastal and marine adaptation decisions in the face of deep uncertainty

Website
Christoph Humrich has worked as an Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security Policy at the University of Groningen since 2012 and is an Associate Researcher at the Arctic Centre there. His research interests focus on the empirical interaction of law and politics, their normative justification and critique. Against this background, he conducts research on issues of international politics and security of the seas and polar regions, with a current focus on regional maritime politics and security in the Arctic and projects on multi-level dynamics of the Arctic governance architecture as well as strategies of actors of marine and maritime security in the Arctic Ocean.

Research interests:

Regional security in the Arctic

International environmental policy in the Arctic

Interaction of global and regional ocean governance arrangements

Adaptation of Coast Guards and Navies to Marine and Maritime Change (in the Arctic Ocean)

Website
Irit Ittner works at IDOS in Bonn in a project of the German Alliance for Marine Research (DAM). Her ethnographic study examines questions of transnational marine governance based on authorisation procedures, political dynamics and resistance to a marine gas extraction project on the German-Dutch border, off the islands of Borkum and Schiermonnigkoog. Irit’s research also focusses on spontaneous urban development in the West African coastal metropolis of Abidjan. She represents German marine research on the Management Board of the EU COST Action Group “Re-thinking the Blue Economy” (2023-2027).

Research interests:

Environmental governance

Marine, environmental and urban ethnology

Environmental activism

Marine gas and oil production

Rethinking the blue economy

North Sea, West African coastal cities

Website
Tina Kaiser (Dr.phil.) is a film and media scholar at Philipps University Marburg and works as a freelance film dramaturge for cinema and TV documentaries, including “Expedition Arktis 2 – Tauchfahrt am Nordpol” (director: Philipp Grieß, Manuel Ernst). She is a board member of the hFMA Hessian Film and Media Academy, head of the Marburg Institute series “Doing Audio-Visual Media” and “SGreen Shorts” and a founding member of the EcoMedia working group of the German Society for Media Studies. Current research project: “Witterungsverhältnisse – Sensing the Atmosphere: Film Dramaturgy as Audiovisual Work”.

Research interests:

Marine cultural and film studies

Audiovisual strategies and/or for human-nature narratives

EcoCinema, EcoMedia and EcoAesthetics

Environmental Humanities

Film style and film dramaturgy

Research shipping and expedition film

Website
Prof. Dr. Susanne Stoll-Kleemann ist Lehrstuhlinhaberin und Professorin für Nachhaltigkeitswissenschaft und Angewandte Geographie an der Universität Greifswald. Sie leitet dort den Masterstudiengang „Nachhaltigkeitsgeographie“. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind klimagerechtes Verhalten und die Bedingungen einer echten sozial-ökologische Transformation an der Schnittstelle zwischen individuellen Verhalten und polit-ökonomischen Rahmenbedingungen. Sie leitet das das Cluster „Nachhaltigkeit“ am IFZO (Interdisziplinäres Forschungszentrum Ostseeraum) mit dem Schwerpunkt „Ocean Literacy und Behavior Change“ sowie weitere Drittmittelprojekte, u. a. zu biodiversitätsgerechter Landwirtschaft im Ostseeraum.

Research interests:

Ocean Literacy und Behavioural Change

Klimagerechtigkeit

Ocean Connectedness und Marine Identity

Analyse der Mensch-Umwelt – besonders des Mensch-Meer – Beziehung als Bestandteil einer transformativen Geographie und Umweltpsychologie zur Generierung umsetzbarer Lösungsansätze

Website
Silja Klepp is Professor of Human Geography and UNESCO Chair of Integrated Marine Science at Kiel University. Her research group “Social Dynamics in Coastal and Marine Areas” focuses on human-environment relations in the Anthropocene. In her current research on climate governance, she is particularly interested in equity issues, how to integrate social and cultural diversity into climate change adaptation measures and policies, and how to ensure the self-determination of affected communities. Silja has conducted field research in Kiribati, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Italy, Libya, Malta and Zambia. She has won several awards for her doctoral thesis on refugees and border spaces in the Mediterranean. Together with colleagues, Silja Klepp founded the transdisciplinary network for environmental justice EnJust (www.enjust.net). To work inclusively and creatively, she also uses transdisciplinary approaches and experiments with artistic research.

Research interests:

Environmental and climate justice

Social impacts of climate change

political ecology

Human geography, social anthropology

Italy, Mediterranean, Kiribati, Oceania and Northern Germany

Website
Vera Köpsel completed her PhD in geography at the end of 2017 and is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Marine Ecosystem and Fisheries Sciences (IMF) at the University of Hamburg. There she is involved in the PANDORA project for sustainable fisheries management (EU Horizon2020) and coordinates its project communication and stakeholder engagement activities. She is also conducting a research project on regional differences in stakeholder engagement in the fisheries sector. Her case studies are the PANDORA study areas: the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Bay of Biscay, the Strait of Sicily, the Aegean Sea and the Western Mediterranean Sea.

Research interests:

Human-environment relations

Social dynamics of climate change adaptation

Stakeholder engagement in EU projects

The role of narratives in environmental management processes

Science communication

Website
Geographer and research assistant at the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel. As part of her habilitation project, she is working on climate services and the extent to which they can be used in decision-making processes for climate adaptation. Central to her scientific work is the proactive, human approach to climate change with a thematic focus on sea-level rise and its consequences for coastal areas. In recent years, Jana Koerth has focused on the integration of different climate adaptation strategies in coastal areas.

Research interests:

Climate adaptation

Climate services

Motivators of climate adaptation decisions

Sea level rise and storm surges

Website
Daniel Lambach is a political scientist with a soft spot for the political geography of the oceans. He holds a DFG-funded Heisenberg fellowship at the Research Centre Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is also a /Privatdozent/ in political science at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Duisburg-Essen and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Institute for Development and Peace there. Daniel’s research focuses on the spatial design and governance of areas beyond national jurisdiction, including the high seas, the poles and the seabed. His relevant publications include “Technology and the Construction of Oceanic Space: Bathymetry and the Arctic Continental Shelf Dispute” (Political Geography, 2022) and “The Functional Territorialization of the High Seas” (Marine Policy, 2021).

Research interests:

Ocean governance

Social constructions of marine spaces

Science and Technology Studies

Bathymetry

Arctic policy

Website
Economic sociologist in the research area “Future Structures of Coastal Fisheries” at the Thünen Institute of Sea and Baltic Sea Fisheries. Tobias Lasner’s work encompasses actor-centred and action-theoretical research of coastal communities. That is, he places the actions and options for action of the affected and responsible people at the centre of his research interest. The focus of his work here is on coastal fishing in the North Sea and Baltic Sea. The focus is on the fishermen and fisherwomen themselves, and in broader circles on the living environment of the coastal communities surrounding them, the competing uses, the legal framework from politics and administration, and last but not least, the science researching marine resources and fisheries itself. In doing so, he uses different qualitative and quantitative methods of empirical social research.

Research interests:

Maritime sociology

Fisheries sociology

Entrepreneurship

Coastal fisheries

Empirical social research

Website
Dr Gesche Krause is a social scientist working at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. She studied at the universities of Kiel and Greifswald (Germany) and received her PhD in philosophy from Stockholm University (Sweden). In addition to working for several years in various private sector companies, she conducted long-term social science research on the Amazon in Brazil, as well as in Indonesia on the Spermonde Archipelago. Since 2013 she works at the AWI, where her research focuses on knowledge transfer processes and evaluation, the interactions between science and stakeholders in marine (resource) systems, as well as the impacts of science on social processes.

Research interests:

Science-Policy-Interaction

Process and impact research

Protection and use of marine resources

Human-nature relations

Website
Research associate at the Research Group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the Centre for Earth System Research and Sustainability at the University of Hamburg. Also, since 2012, speaker of the working group “Coastal and Marine Geography” (AMK) of the German Society of Geography. His research interests focus on the societal impacts of climate change. One emphasis is on the connection between changes in water availability and the occurrence of conflict or cooperation; another focus is the social acceptance of renewable energies in coastal regions. He uses agent-based models and geographic information systems to investigate conflict risks and cooperation opportunities in different development paths.

Research interests:

Link between water availability and conflicts

Acceptance of renewable energy production in coastal regions and in the sea

Long-term effects of sea-level rise on river deltas

Link between climate change and conflicts

Website
Foto: Stephan Röhl |
Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, Institute Faculty Member at Duke University’s Berlin Program, and Associate Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Studies in history, literature and economics led to research interests in social processes of climate change adaptation and resilience in coastal areas worldwide, captured as transformational processes within institutional, cultural, social, economic and political contexts. Grit Martinez is also concerned with the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration between the social sciences and humanities and the natural, engineering and life sciences. She is active in numerous projects for the European Commission and German Research Foundation.

Research interests:

Climate cultures and narrative theory

Social-ecological transformation in coastal regions

Bridge concepts for interdisciplinary cooperation between the humanities and natural sciences

Website
Laura McAdam-Otto is an ethnographer and cultural anthropologist. She is currently leading the DFG-funded research project “Making Algae (In-) Visible: Tourism, Responsibility and Governance in the Caribbean” as Principal Investigator at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Her research is situated at the intersection of cultural anthropology, nature-culture debates and science and technology studies (STS) and focuses on issues of human-environment relations in the Caribbean. The research project discusses how responsibility for environmental change is negotiated and distributed in the Anthropocene and foregrounds issues of environmental justice and governance.

Research interests:

Social-ecological coastal transformations

Human-environment relations

Caribbean, Mexico, Malta, Mediterranean Sea

Cultural and Social Anthropology

Website
Aletta Mondré is Professor of Political Science with a focus on International Maritime Policy at CAU Kiel. She is a member of the Cluster of Excellence Future Ocean and Kiel Marine Science. Her field of work is the diverse regulatory issues that arise from the different claims to use and ideas of protection for the oceans. For example, she investigates the negotiation processes of regulating deep-sea mining. She did her doctorate at the University of Bremen on strategies for settling maritime boundary disputes.

Research interests:

Ocean Governance Architecture

Deep sea mining

Conflicts over marine areas

Website
Dr Barbara Neumann leads the Ocean Governance Research Group at the Research Institute for Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam. Trained as a geographer, she has specialized in sustainable development and governance of coastal and marine areas. Positioned in the research of society-environment interactions and global change processes, her research interest is in understanding boundary conditions and governance processes and how these can be shaped for sustainability transformations in the context of ocean and coasts. She holds a doctorate in Geography from Saarland University, Germany.

Research interests:

Sustainable development and governance of coasts and seas

Human-environment interactions in coastal and marine areas

Climate and ocean nexus

Sustainability research

Transformation research

Website
Nane Pelke is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Centre for Sustainable Society Research at the University of Hamburg and is currently working on the DFG research project “Experiencing Nature and Society. A multi-sited investigation of marine biological and ethnographic field sciences”. Her research is dedicated to exploring methodological approaches for interdisciplinary collaboration between the natural sciences and environmental social sciences. Her research interests include marine social sciences, ethnographic methods, marine science studies and eco-social transformation processes.

Research interests:

Marine Social Sciences

Ethnographic methods

Marine-related scientific research

Eco-social transformation processes

Inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation

Website
Kimberley Peters is Professor and Head of the Marine Governance Research Group at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB). Within this interdisciplinary centre, Kim uses spatial frameworks to understand how water spaces are organised and managed, and takes a critical approach to questioning operations of power at sea. She is a socio-cultural and political geographer and has explored issues ranging from offshore piracy to prison transport, deep-sea mining politics to shipping routes. Kim’s work appears in the edited books: Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (Ashgate, 2014), The Mobilities of Ships (Routledge, 2015), Carceral Mobilities (Routledge, 2017) and Territory Beyond Terra (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), as well as the monograph Sound, Space, Society: Rebel Radio (Palgrave, 2018). She is the author of the cross-disciplinary textbook Your Human Geography Dissertation: Designing, Doing, Delivering (Sage, 2017) and the recently published Handbook of Ocean Space (2022).

Research interests:

(More than) human geographies of the ocean

Theories of space and spatiality in relation to the ocean (and vice versa)

Borders, demarcations and processes of territorial formation at sea

Critical approaches to maritime policy

De-, anti- and post-colonial knowledge

Qualitative methods/approaches and practices

Website
Beate Ratter is Professor of Integrative Geography at the University of Hamburg. She researches the perception of nature, natural events and risks in different regional cultures and their consideration as well as the participation of the affected population in the development of adapted sustainable management concepts. Research foci include integrated coastal zone management and the socio-economic aspects of climate change as well as adaptation strategies and risk perception in coastal areas and on small islands. Regional research focuses on the Caribbean, SIDS and the European Wadden Sea region. The coastal zone is a space of interaction between land, coast and sea in which particular pressures on societies become effective against the background of ongoing global climate change and economic and cultural globalisation.

Research interests:

Societal coastal and island research

Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems

Risk management

Climate change and social adaptation

Complexity theory

Website
Political scientist specialising in international relations, foreign and security policy and peace and conflict research at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH). She completed her doctorate at the University of Hamburg. She received her BA and MA from the American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on questions of identity, perception, spatial constructions, discourse and power, and how these affect developments in maritime security. For several years, she has been studying developments in the Arctic with reference to conflict and cooperation between littoral states and Arctic-interested states.

Research interests:

Maritime Security, Cooperation and Conflict

Identity

Spatial constructions

Perception

Discourse and power

Website
Karlin Schumacher is a cultural scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. Her research focusses on the positioning and negotiation processes of local actors in Arctic coastal communities in the context of climate change. At the centre are questions of responsibility, practices of dealing with persistent contradictions and patterns of perception of ecological transformations. Methodologically, she works with empirical-ethnographic approaches and approaches of qualitative social research.

Research interests:

Cultural analysis and anthropology of climate change

Ethnographic methods

Anthropology of Contradiction

Arctic, Lofoten

Arctic indigenous studies

Website
Cormac Walsh is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Hamburg. He is currently working on the spatial aspects of coastal management and nature conservation of the Wadden Sea in a comparative perspective (DFG 2016-2019). He is interested in the governance of land-sea interactions at the interface of marine and terrestrial spatial planning. He has worked in research projects on regional development and spatial planning in Ireland and Germany. He wrote his PhD on the topic of strategic spatial planning at University College Dublin in 2010. Together with Friederike Gesing and Rapti Siriwardana de-Zoysa, he publishes a scientific blog: marinecoastalcultures.com.

Research interests:

Land-sea interactions

Maritime spatial planning

Integrated coastal management

Nature of conservation

Governance spaces and premises

Website
Dr Christian Wirth is a Research Fellow at the GIGA Leibniz Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane. After graduating in law from the University of St. Gallen and several years in the civil service of the Swiss Federal Administration, he studied Chinese in Beijing and completed his doctorate on the topic of Sino-Japanese relations in the context of East Asia’s region-building at Waseda University in Tokyo. Subsequent research stays at Waseda, Griffith, Korea and Tohoku Universities enabled him to delve deeper into the topic of maritime politics in East Asia.

Research interests:

The importance of maritime space for the rediscovery of geopolitical ideas of (international) order(s)

The interrelationship between contemporary geopolitics and the international law of the sea (UNCLOS) in the Indian and Pacific Oceans

The consequences of changing norms and boundaries for the governance of the seas in the Western Pacific and the Eastern Indian Ocean

Socio-political transformations and the ‘Blue Economy’

Website