The Politics of Beginning: The Origins of Private Authority in the Process of Translation

Dr. Alejandro Esguerra | Tue, November 4, 2025; 6:15 pm | SH 4.104, Seminarhaus, Westend Campus, Goethe University

I develop a dramaturgical methodology with metaphors of theatre such as stage, script, and performance. This methodology can be used to analyze the ways in which activists and others translate knowledge about governance and the practices of inclusion and exclusion that appear during this process. The environmental crisis requires a transformation in the ways societies value and govern human–nature relations, and The Politics of Beginning reveals the conditions under which even formerly antagonistic actors start developing a common political project.

Bio
Alejandro Esguerra is post-doc at the working group Political Sociology, University Bielefeld. He obtained his PhD in International Relations at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has researched and taught at Cornell University, UFZ Leipzig, the Centre for Global Cooperation Research Duisburg as well as the University of Potsdam. His work is concerned with global environmental politics, especially the role of environmental expertise, private authority, and objects and translation in International Relations theory. Among his recent publications are with Tobias Berger ‘World Politics in Translation: Power, Relationality and Difference in Global Cooperation’ (Routledge 2018), ‚Future Objects: Tracing the Socio-Material Politics of Anticipation‘ (Sustainability Science 2019) and with Sandra van der Hel ‚Participatory Designs and Epistemic Authority in Knowledge Platforms for Sustainability‘ (Global Environmental Politics, 2021).

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‘Too much, too little‘: The politics of intensity in crisis times

Prof Ben Anderson | 23 October 2025, 16:15-17:45 | PEG 1.G192, Goethe University, Campus Westend

After giving examples of past crises of intensity articulated with the end of the Fordist settlement and expressed through claims of boredom, he will show how contemporary right-wing populism is simultaneously symptom, cause, and promised resolution to a crisis of intensity marked by the indeterminacy of whether life should feel ‘more’ or ‘less’. As well as showing how this promised resolution is articulated with a series of right wing adjacent online cultures, he will speculate on the implications of this present crisis of intensity for transformations in capitalism and the futures of populism.

Bio
Ben Anderson is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. He has published extensively on affective life as articulated with politics, as well as how futures are governed amid uncertainty. He is co-author (with Prof. Anna J Secor) of The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2025) and Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge, 2014). As well as theoretical work on conjunctural analysis and attachment and detachment as affective relations, his current research focuses on the politics of intensity in right-wing populism and on climate change disaffection.   

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Book Launch: The Politics of Feeling

Tuesday, October 21^st, 2025, 6:15 to 7:45 p.m. | Campus Westend, Seminarhaus, SH 1.101

“THE POLITICS OF FEELING. POPULISM, PROGRESSIVISM, LIBERALISM”
(Goldsmiths Press, 2025)

Ben Anderson in conversation with Sophia Leipert and Florian Skelton, chair Julia Schubert

Ben Anderson is a professor in the department of geography at Durham University and currently a Mercator fellow at the “Fixing Futures” research training group.

Sophia Leipert is a doctoral researcher in the “Fixing Futures” research training group at Goethe-University Frankfurt.

Julia Schubert is a postdoctoral researcher in the “Fixing Futures” research training group at Goethe-University Frankfurt.

Florian Skelton is a doctoral researcher in the “Fixing Futures” research training group at Goethe-University Frankfurt.

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Data critters: a partial inventory

Susanne Bauer (University of Oslo) | Thursday, July 3, 2025, at 17-19 (c.t.) | SKW B

Digital fish, AI-designed enzymes, voice biomarkers, epidemiological risk scores – these are just some of the digital formations that proliferate with ubiquitous datafication. Emergent data critters thrive in the life sciences and beyond; they populate research proposals, science and technology policies, public debates and are imbued with anticipation. While some data critters may be transitory and disappear again, they leave traces, modify their surroundings, are being worked upon, or seep into infrastructure. Data sets mobilized in recent AI aspirations contain legacy infrastructures that cannot be fully disentangled; rather they need to be treated as mixtures and unpurified archives from the outset. Asking for what remains unaccounted for in this current digital reassembling can help render visible the orderings and politics in pertinent data ecologies. This talk will introduce a small subset of data critters and propose the format of a partial inventory as a method to engage with things digital.

We are pleased to invite you to this public keynote lectures that will take place as part of the summer school ECOLOGICAL DATA – DATA ECOLOGIES: Engaging with Methods for Critical Data Studies.

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An Anthropologist under the Surface: Time, Distance, Texture

Dr. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio at the University of Southern California. Her book  A Future History of Water (Duke 2019) examines how people engage with the world as it is, but differently and do so by creating endless bifurcations. In Costa Rica and Brazil, where the ethnography is located, bifurcations are means to create a difference between water as a human right and water as a commodity as material and political projects. She is co-editor of Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (2021), a collection of essays and protocols to inspire creative analytic ethnographic work. Currently, Dr. Ballestero is writing a book that explores cultural imaginaries of the underground as a new planetary frontier. In recent publications she has explored aquifers as financial frontiers, practices of touching with light through GIS technologies, physical models as hydro-geo-social choreographies of responsibility, and the concept of casual planetarities. Her scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist STS, legal anthropology, and social studies of finance and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright program. Her works can be found at https://andreaballestero.com

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The World Will Become Brazil:

Modified Mosquitoes and the Limits of Situated Knowledges in Times of Planetary Transformations

| 10.12.2024, 6:15 pm, PEG 1G.111 | Prof. Dr. Luísa Reis-Castro (University of Southern California) |

For more than one hundred years, public health campaigns in Brazil have targeted the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a vector of viruses such as yellow fever, dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. However, a new project being implemented in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, proposes a radically different approach: to deploy A. aegypti infected with Wolbachia bacterium, a maternally inherited microbe shown to hinder viral transmission. “Wolbachia mosquitoes” are being released to mate with their “wild” conspecifics, transforming subsequent generations into less effective vectors. According to project proponents, Brazilian releases would produce meaningful epidemiological results, generating knowledge to grapple with future mosquito-borne diseases worldwide. That was particularly important, they argued, since rising global temperatures are predicted to increase the mosquito’s transmission rates and expand its geographic range. Or as one entomologist put it, “When it comes to mosquitoes, the world will become Brazil.”

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rio de Janeiro from November 2017 to July 2018, I investigate how my interlocutors mobilized their situatedness to position the Wolbachia strategy as a planetary solution within the aftermath of failed vector control policies and the impending transformations of climate change. Whereas anthropologists of science and scholars of science and technology studies (STS) often argue that situating knowledges helps reveal political, social, and ethical considerations, my ethnographic research shows instead that situatedness can also be strategically deployed, including to evade, mask, and obscure these very considerations.

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| 25.11.2024, 6:15 pm, IG 1.314 (IG-Farben-Haus) | Prof. Dr. Stefan Aykut (University of Hamburg) |

Predictive policy assemblages

The role of scenarios, models and future-knowledge in energy policy stability and change

Forecasts and scenarios are ubiquitous in energy debates: commonly calculated using energy system models, they are employed by governments, administrations and civil society actors to identify problems, choose between potential solutions, and justify or legitimize specific forms of political intervention. Ongoing debates about ‘energy transitions’ have renewed scholarly interest in the role of such ‘foreknowledge’ in energy policy and in its potential to contribute to the transformation of energy systems worldwide. The talk contributes to these debates through a historic study on the evolution of epistemic practices of foreknowledge-making, and their relation to the emergence and structuring of ‘energy policy’ as an autonomous policy domain in France and Germany. Bringing together two strands of literature – work in the anthropology of politics on ‘policy assemblages’, and STS research on the ‘performative’ effects of knowledge – the talk examines how ways of assembling energy systems in energy modelling, and of bringing together policy networks in forecasting exercises, either reinforce path-dependences and lock-in, or enable alternatives and policy change.

Stefan Aykut is a professor in Sociology at University of Hamburg. The central focus of his research and teaching revolves around society’s engagement with ecological issues, particularly climate change. Stefan Aykut is interested in understanding how ecological crises are interpreted scientifically, politically addressed, and potentially catalyze processes of social change while his research emphasizes studies on global climate governance, ecological transformation processes, and the institutionalization of global ecological boundaries in various societal domains, such as finance and national legal systems.

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| 28.10.2024, 6:15 pm, PEG 1.G150 | Prof. Dr. Liliana Doganova (PSL University Paris) | 

Discounting the Future

The Ascendancy of a Political Technology

The forest fires and extreme episodes of drought and flood that have afflicted Europe in the last few years incarnated not only the effects of climate change but also the aporias of climate action. Struggling with the urgency of saving the present and the preparedness for a warming future, how can we envision the possibility to act on the future? In this lecture, Liliana Doganova proposes to address this issue through the devices that compose our relationship with the future. She focuses on a device that recently came under the spotlights in debates on climate change but has been entrenched in economic and policy practices for decades. This device is discounting: a technique that values all things through the flows of costs and benefits/revenues that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present.

Building on herrecently published book „Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books, 2024)“, she outlines three troubles with discounting. First, is the future worth less than the present, and should it be counted or discounted? Second, does value stem from the future, and should looking to the future guide acting in the present? Third, is discounting a general form of action, which encompasses all kinds of entities and issues? She discusses these three troubles through past and present examples relating to the use of discounting in governments’ and investors’ attempts at valuing forests and mineral resources. Analysing discounting as a political technology leads her to exploring the links between temporality and valuation. She concludes that shifting focus from the problem of (not) knowing the future to the problem of (de)valuing the future enables us to examine afresh what acting on the future means and entails.

Liliana Doganova is Associate Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines Paris, PSL University. She is the author of “Valoriser la Science“ and co-author of “Capitalization. A Cultural Guide”.

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09.07.2024, 6 p.m. (ct) , PEG 1.G111

Unruly collaborators: Rendering waves and microbes in more-than-human ethnographies

| Dual Lecture: Heather Paxson (MIT) and Stefan Helmreich (MIT) |

For artisan cheesemakers, the craft of cheesemaking is a collaborative endeavor, requiring the subvisible activity of microbes to realize the end product. For scientists, policymakers, epidemiologists and others, waves are symbols, signals, and materializations of abstract nonhuman dimensions of experience; like the tidal pull of the moon or the surge and retreat of COVID-19 infections over time.

This dual lecture explores both of these ethnographic contexts, rendering the more-than-human as unruly collaborators or agents that are essential for the production of „good“ cheese and „good“ science. 

Heather Paxson is a professor of anthropology at MIT. Her research encompasses a diverse array of subjects, ranging from microbes and food to the ethnography of artisans and reproductive technologies. Her primary interest lies in exploring how individuals construct their moral identities within the fabric of their everyday lives, particularly through their interactions with family and food.

Stefan Helmreich is a professor of anthropology at MIT. His research focusses on how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics, and computer science define and theorize their objects of study. His latest book, „A Book of Waves“ (Duke University Press, 2023), delves into the intricate world of ocean wave monitoring and modelling.

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04.07.2024, 4 p.m. (ct), PEG 1.G107

Lying fallow: dichotomies and negotiations

| Dr. Anna-Katharina Laboissière (University of Oslo) |

The practice of intentional fallowing, edged out by the advent of synthetic fertilisers in the 19th century, nevertheless continues existing as an object interest in agricultural policy and microbiology in recent years; it responds to a growing concern with the depletion and regeneration of soils in agricultural and environmental policy. Fallowing emerges or re-emerges at points of ecological, economic or social breakdown, functioning variously as buffer, mediator, or destructor. It functions variously as an agricultural technique for weed-breaking or soil remediation, as a wildlife conservation tool, as a microbiological reserve or as a price-regulating constraint. Fallowed soils are the sites of interplaying dichotomies and biopolitical negotiations concerning idleness, unproductivity, and resilience.
In this seminar, I will present an overview of the first phase of my current research project “FALLOW: Generative idleness and gestures of reparation”, and ask how fallowing practices function as tools mediating different forms of human-soil relationships and allowing the formation of certain kinds of knowledge about soils and soil ecosystems.

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02.07.2024, 6 p.m. (ct) , PEG 1.G107

Climate Changed Futures:  On Anticipatory Action in the Climate Emergency

| Prof. Ben Anderson (Durham University) |

How is climate change governed as a problem of the future? And how does climate change related anticipatory action differ from pre-emption, precaution and other ways in which terrorism, trans-species epidemics, and other events and situations have been governed over the past twenty years?

The lecture asks how climate change is governed as a problem of the future by focusing on the widespread use of the term ‘emergency’ to apprehend the event. Unlike crisis or disaster, ‘emergency’ is a form of anticipation that opens up an ‘interval’ of action in the present – the promise is that correct action can make a difference. Emergency is a term of hope, albeit always a desperate hope inseparable from the affect of urgency. In an emergency, time for action is always running out. Whilst attentive to the uses of ‘climate emergency’ as technique by activists and its existence as part of the atmospheres of the crisis present, I argue that the normalisation of ‘climate emergency’ has underpinned a shift in the dominant form of climate change related anticipatory action. Climate change is rendered perceivable and governable as a proliferating set of possible ‘impacts’ or ‘effects’ through the logics, practices and affects derived from the fields of emergency planning. I speculate on how this change is part of broader shifts in how western societies relate to the future in the present impasse, and explore its implications for the politics of climate (in)action.

Ben Anderson is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, specializing in affect and emotion, non-representational theories, and anticipatory logics/techniques. His research explores the governance of life amidst emergencies, with a recent focus on examining how claims of emergency are utilized by progressive groups to highlight ongoing inequalities and injustices.

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13.05.24, 6:15 p.m. – 7:45 p.m.

Predictive policy assemblages. The role of scenarios, models and future-knowledge in energy policy stability and change

| Prof. Stefan Aykut (University of Hamburg) |

Unfortunately, the lecture with Prof. Dr. Stefan Aykut was canceled due to illness.

Forecasts and scenarios are ubiquitous in energy debates: commonly calculated using energy system models, they are employed by governments, administrations and civil society actors to identify problems, choose between potential solutions, and justify or legitimize specific forms of political intervention. Ongoing debates about ‘energy transitions’ have renewed scholarly interest in the role of such ‘foreknowledge’ in energy policy and in its potential to contribute to the transformation of energy systems worldwide. The talk contributes to these debates through a historic study on the evolution of epistemic practices of foreknowledge-making, and their relation to the emergence and structuring of ‘energy policy’ as an autonomous policy domain in France and Germany. Bringing together two strands of literature – work in the anthropology of politics on ‘policy assemblages’, and STS research on the ‘performative’ effects of knowledge – the talk examines how ways of assembling energy systems in energy modelling, and of bringing together policy networks in forecasting exercises, either reinforce path-dependences and lock-in, or enable alternatives and policy change.

Stefan Aykut is a professor in Sociology at University of Hamburg. The central focus of his research and teaching revolves around society’s engagement with ecological issues, particularly climate change. Stefan Aykut is interested in understanding how ecological crises are interpreted scientifically, politically addressed, and potentially catalyze processes of social change while his research emphasizes studies on global climate governance, ecological transformation processes, and the institutionalization of global ecological boundaries in various societal domains, such as finance and national legal systems.

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02.05.24, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 pm

Constructing ‚Anti-Racist‘ Authoritarian Science, 1950-Present 

| Prof. Jenny Reardon (University of California, Santa Cruz) |

How did proponents of theories of racial hygiene under the National Socialist regime
in Germany come to serve as experts who drafted and commented on the UNESCO
Statements on Race? For nearly seventy-five years, these Statements have served as
paradigmatic reference points for scholars and activists who have sought to argue
that the concept of race has no meaningful basis in biology, and that all are human,
deserving of fundamental rights. What sense can be made of this troubling puzzle
that lies at the heart of their drafting? The answer, I argue, lies in unraveling how
during the early years of the Cold War, scientists, political leaders and bureaucrats
forged an understanding of ‘science’ as a moral force of ‘truth’ that could undergird
liberal democracies and oppose ideologies of racism and Communism. This talk
documents how Cold War constructions of science and science policy worked to
rehabilitate the moral status of geneticists and physical anthropologists who
supported the eugenics and sterilization policies of the National Socialist regime, but
who after WWII opposed Lysenkoist theories of genetics propagated by the Soviet
Communist Party. I conclude by considering how this episode can help shed light on
the current moment in which many once again attempt to mobilize ‘science’ as an
anti-racist, anti-authoritarian force. How far have liberal democracies moved from a
Cold War politics of science and truth that fosters racism even as it claims to be antiracist?

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Science and
Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research
draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often
silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic
research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science
studies, feminist and critical race studies. She is the author of Race to the Finish:
Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005)
and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome
(Chicago University Press, 2017).

The lecture will take place in cooperation with the Critical Genomics Network.

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14.02.24, 6:15 p.m., PEG 1.G107

Lecture Dr. Lindsay Poirier: Fixing Accountability: Materializing and Mobilizing Disclosure Datasets

Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Sciences Smith College, Northampton, MA

In her talk, Poirier examines the increasing reliance on public information disclosure for risk regulation. Policies mandating disclosure by government agencies, politicians, businesses, and organizations aim to enhance transparency and combat undesirable practices. Poirier explores how stakeholders shape the scope, meaning, and influence of such data through ethnographic observations of „disclosure datasets.“ She argues that these datasets embody inconsistent visions of credible knowledge, conflicting ideas on societal organization, and ambivalent perspectives on transparency’s role in ensuring accountability.

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17.10.2023, 06:15 pm, PEG 2.G107

Lecture Dr. Malka Older: Disaster Present – Disaster Futures

Older is a science fiction writer and sociologist.

Disasters are often framed as exceptional events, bubbles of extraordinary time apart from normality, with a return to that so-called normal as the goal. In this era of the Anthropocene, however, disasters are rapidly becoming the norm. What can disaster studies tell us about how to respond? How can we better govern ourselves, both during acute crises, and throughout the slow grinding emergencies of late capitalism? Disasters, with their compressed time frames and often intense documentation and scrutiny, offer clues for better collaboration and the pitfalls of desperation.

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16.01.24, 6:15 pm, SH3.105

Lecture Prof. Dr. Jörg Niewöhner: Science after Progress

Technical University of Munich /
TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology /
Anthropology of Science and Technology

Much life scientific research until today has been directed at understanding the building blocks and dynamics of life as if they existed in a pristine state. Natural life if you will. The Anthropocene, however, alerts us to the fact that life-as-natural has ceased to exist. The globally dominant capitalist exchange systems have altered life from the molecular to landscape structures and planetary circulations. ‘Science after progress’ is thus a call to pay attention to life-in-action, i.e. to how metabolic, immune, and endocrine processes are inhabited by the political economies of our past and present.
In this talk, trying to link to the theme of ‘fixing futures’, I want to explore the temporal aspects that are enacted through a science after progress. Contrary to the current obsession with anticipation of all sorts, I would like to contend that fixing futures demands at least also a biology of history (Landecker) through which we overcome the sacrificial logics of the future perfect (Povinelli). Such an approach demands interdisciplinarity in various forms and thus places an ethnographic STS in a central role as mediator between distant epistemic cultures.

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23.01.2024, 6:15 pm, PEG 2.G107

Lecture Prof. Dr. Luigi Pellizzoni: Will the future ever begin? On the logic of non-linear anticipations

University of Firenze

In a seminal work, one of the greatest sociologists of the 20th century, Niklas Luhmann, noted that the relationship with time established in modernity is peculiar in that the future is conceived as open-ended and therefore requires technologies, first of all probabilistic prediction, capable of making it actionable, ‘defuturizing’ it to the present. This means limiting the number of possibilities, though the horizon of events ever shifts forward and in this sense, Luhmann says, the future ‘cannot begin’. In late modernity the politics of time has become increasingly relevant and the relationship with the future more complex. Defuturizing technologies have diversified and intensified accordingly. Two are especially worthy of attention: pre-emption and preparedness. They have been described as forms of precautionary action, yet, differently to precaution, their temporal structure is non-linear. They both foreshadow catastrophic or restorative futures, positing them as certain and elusive at once. As a result, the present becomes indefinitely protracted and plastic. This means the future ‘cannot begin’ in quite a different way to the traditional understanding – not because ever-unfolding but because occluded. Clues to this condition are the replacement of the traditional concept of revolution with that of transition; the fact, testified by ‘post-apocalyptic’ activism, that public emphasis on the future grows together with the perception of its fading away; and recent examples of emergency governance. Some mobilisations are apparently trying to (re)open the future by parting company with both utopian and dystopian thinking through a peculiar anticipatory work on the present.

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7.12.2023, 4pm, PEG 1G107

Lecture Prof. Henning Laux: Weltverbesserungstechnologien

Leibnitz University Hannover

In jüngster Zeit werden neue Technologien immer häufiger mit einer Semantik der disruptiven Weltverbesserung verknüpft. In einem laufenden Forschungsprojekt inspizieren wir anhand von drei Fallstudien – Clean Meat, Social Freezing und Digitale Assistenten – was sich hinter dieser Rhetorik verbirgt. Dabei geraten im Anschluss an Theorien der Rechtfertigungsordnung (Boltanski/Thévenot 1991; Boltanski/Chiapello 1999) und aktuelle Analysen zum digitalen Kapitalismus (Morozov 2013; Nachtwey/Seidl 2017) die Konturen einer Polis der Solution in den Blick, in der technische Lösungen für existenzielle Menschheitsprobleme wie Armut, Hunger, Krankheit oder Tod in Aussicht gestellt werden. Der Vortrag arbeitet die Besonderheiten dieser soziomateriellen Symbolordnung heraus und fragt nach den Implikationen für die Praxis der Gesellschaft und ihrer soziologischen Kritik.