Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Quirin has been a PhD student and University Assistant (pre-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 infrastructure and energy transitions regarding, for example, energy cooperatives in Germany. He is interested in the making of ‘the state’, as well as in the relationship 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 at the transformative role of energy sharing and community-owned hydro-powerplants. I relate changes in communal land ownership and rural political mobilisation 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, the 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