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, and London. During his studies he worked on the socio-political implications of infrastructural and energy transitions, e.g. regarding energy cooperatives in Germany. He is interested in the making of ‘the state’ as well as in the relation between infrastructure, the reproduction of social inequalities, and non-state political organisation.

Dissertation project: Caring through Electricity (working title)

My PhD project deals with questions of access to infrastructure, energy justice, and self-governance, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Pakistan. In a context of extreme load-shedding (electricity poverty) and political marginalisation, the project looks into the transformative role of energy sharing and community-owned hydro-powerplants. Changes in communal land ownership and rural political mobilisation are put in relation to climate change and transnational infrastructural projects. Combining the sensory experience of electricity shortage with state and non-state energy development and forms of dispossessions, I investigate the contingencies and inequalities of contemporary energy politics. Through this, my PhD thesis shows how infrastructural practices of caring through electricity shape social organisation and subjectivities/identities.

Selected Publications

• 2023. “Living Along Infrastructural Lines: Following Electricity in Hunza, Pakistan”. In: Martin Porr & Niels Weidtmann (ed.). One World Anthropology and Beyond: A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold. London: Routledge. pp. 171–184. DOI: 10.4324/9781003162773-18
• 2023. “Power to Which People? Energiegerechtigkeit und ownership-Strukturen in Energiegenossenschaften”. In: Silja Klepp & Jonas Hein (ed.) Umweltgerechtigkeit und sozialökologische Transformation: Konflikte um Nachhaltigkeit im deutschsprachigen Raum. Bielefeld: transcript. pp. 117–143. –– coauthored with Konstantin Veit, Nikolaj Moretti, Luis Peters and Celine Li. [in German | open access]
• 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