Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Quirin is a PhD student and University Assistant (prae-doc) at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology since October 2021. He studied social anthropology as well as literary and cultural theory in Munich, Tübingen, Durham (UK), and London. During his studies he worked, among other things, on the socio-political implications of energy transitions, especially regarding energy cooperatives in Germany but also the enduring power structure of carbon energy more general.

Dissertation project: Caring through Electricity (working title)

This PhD project researches the role of access to electric energy for the constitution of subjectivities and social organisation. Tracing social relations along access to infrastructure, I argue, reveals negotiations over who provides and ‘cares’ for whom, and for which reasons. Every actor involved in the production, distribution, and use of basic services necessarily engages in an interplay around notions of belonging, responsibility, and deservingness. Electricity, being the basis for an increasing number of everyday activities for people all over the world, plays an exceptional role here. I investigate how infrastructural practices of caring through electricity shape social organisation and subjectivities, understood as structured feelings and perceptions that drive action, while being product of wider circumstances. These practices are particularly visible in situations where there is a multiplicity of infrastructural providers, as in my proposed field site for long-term ethnographic research in northern Pakistan.

Selected Publications

• forthcoming. “Living Along Infrastructural Lines: Following Electricity in Hunza, Pakistan”. In: Martin Porr and Niels Weidtmann (ed.). One World Anthropology and Beyond: A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold. London: Routledge.
  
• 2021. Tim Ingold: Eine kurze Geschichte der Linien. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. (German translation of Lines: A Brief History) https://www.k-up.de/9783835391284-eine-kurze-geschichte-der-linien.html