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.
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
The strategy group at its 2022 annual meeting at ZMT-Bremen
Tanja Bogusz (Speaker)
University of Hamburg | Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS)
Research interests:
Marine Social Sciences
Science Studies
Cultures of knowledge
Social and societal theories
Collaborative research methods
Tanja Bogusz (Dr. habil.) is a sociologist and researcher at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) at the University of Hamburg, as well as a founding and board member of the professional society Science and Technology Studies in Germany (STSinG). In her current DFG project "Experiencing Nature and Society. A multi-sited investigation of marine biological and ethnographic field science", she compares marine scientific research practices (expeditions and stations) with social and cultural scientific analytical procedures. She connects these with an experimentalist sociology of the knowledge society that aims to produce collaborative research formats for marine-related natural and social sciences.
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel | Department of Political Science
Research interests:
Multi-level ocean governance and sustainable development
International climate and maritime policy organisations
Political knowledge integration
Public participation
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.
ZMT Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research, Bremen
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
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.
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel | Institute of Geography
Research interests:
Psychological barriers to climate change adaptation
Environmental and climate justice
Climate communication
Coastal fisheries
Arctic, Northern Germany
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.
Political economies and ecologies of waste, pollution and toxicity
Infrastructures, urban and regional change
Kinship, Reproduction and the Body
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.
Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research | Department of Social Sciences
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
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').
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.
Antje Bruns studied geography at the Humboldt University in Berlin, wrote her thesis on soft coastal protection and completed her doctorate at Kiel University on issues of politics in coastal areas (integrated coastal zone management). The research group she led, WaterPower, focussed on socio-ecological crises in the rapidly growing coastal city of Accra. She is currently a member of the working group "Anticipating Coastal Futures" of the German Committee for Sustainability Research.
Helmholtz Centre Hereon | Institute for Coastal Systems
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
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.
University of Bremen | artec Research Centre Sustainability
Research interests:
Political ecologies of the coast
Co-production of nature and society
Nitrogen management
Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Qualitative methods / praxeography
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.
German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
Research interests:
Interdisciplinary and transcultural knowledge production in marine carbon observations
Ethnography
(Marine) Science and Technology Research
Travel of Knowledges
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.
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
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).
University of Groningen | Centre for International Relations Research (CIRR)
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)
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.
German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
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
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).
Kiel Marine Science | Centre for Interdisciplinary Marine Sciences at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Research interests:
Environmental and climate justice
Social impacts of climate change
political ecology
Human geography, social anthropology
Italy, Mediterranean, Kiribati, Oceania and Northern Germany
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.
University of Hamburg | Institute for Marine Ecosystem and Fishery Sciences
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
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.
Christian Albrechts University of Kiel | Institute of Geography
Research interests:
Climate adaptation
Climate services
Motivators of climate adaptation decisions
Sea level rise and storm surges
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.
Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research
Research interests:
Science-Policy-Interaction
Process and impact research
Protection and use of marine resources
Human-nature relations
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.
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main | Research Centre Normative Orders
Research interests:
Ocean governance
Social constructions of marine spaces
Science and Technology Studies
Bathymetry
Arctic policy
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).
Thünen Institute of Sea Fisheries | Future Structures of Coastal Fisheries
Research interests:
Maritime sociology
Fisheries sociology
Entrepreneurship
Coastal fisheries
Empirical social research
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.
Centre for Earth System Research and Sustainability | Climate Change and Security Research Group
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
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.
Ecologic Institute | Department of Coastal and Marine Studies
Research interests:
Climate cultures and narrative theory
Social-ecological transformation in coastal regions
Bridge concepts for interdisciplinary cooperation between the humanities and natural sciences
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.
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.
Christian Albrechts University of Kiel | Institute for Social Sciences
Research interests:
Ocean Governance Architecture
Deep sea mining
Conflicts over marine areas
Aletta Monde 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 Institute for Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam
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
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.
Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg
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
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).
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.
University of Hamburg | Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy
Research interests:
Maritime Security, Cooperation and Conflict
Identity
Spatial constructions
Perception
Discourse and power
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.
Leuphana University of Lüneburg | Institute of Ecology
Research interests:
Land-sea interactions
Maritime spatial planning
Integrated coastal management
Nature of conservation
Governance spaces and premises
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.
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'
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.
