richterich@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Nils Richterich (he/him) studied Political Science (Bachelor) and Sociology (Master) in Frankfurt and Maynooth (Ireland). After holding a position as a Research Associate at the Chair of Social Inequality in Frankfurt, he is now a PhD candidate at the DFG- funded Research Training Group „Fixing Futures. Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies.“ His research interests involve more-than-human (inequality) sociologies, ethnography, environmental sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
Project Description: Subjects of Nature – Legally Carving out an Ecology in Motion
In view of multiple developing crises, with the loss of biodiversity being at the forefront, more and more countries have established Rights of Nature (RoN). The framework of the RoN encompasses holistic ideas of a transformation in nature-culture relations, as well as indigenous cosmologies and the Western concept of giving ‘nature’ a legal personhood. In this third way, ’nature‘ is to be granted a legal personality enabling legal action on its behalf and to be (re)presented in the political sphere. As a response to a proclaimed failure of classical environmental law, the RoN can thus be understood as an anticipatory technology that makes ’nature‘ legally governable through subjective rights. In my research project, I investigate the first European case of the RoN: the Spanish saltwater lagoon Mar Menor. After numerous ecological degradations of the Mar Menor, civil society successfully introduced RoN for this ‘little sea’ in 2022. My project mobilises ethnography to explore the preparation as well as the materialisation of these subjective rights by examining (1) the history of this technology through the practices of problem work, (2) its materialisation in more-than-human representations and (3) in concrete legal cases.
Publications:
Hoppe, K., Meier, L., Richterich, N., & Wratschko, L. (2024). Der Supermarkt als pandemischer Raum: Affektive Ansteckung in der Corona-Krise. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 53(1), 58–72. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-2024-2006
Richterich, N. (2024). Spontanhelfende als Vergemeinschaftung des resilienten Selbst? Eine ethnografische Spurensuche im Kontext des ‚Jahrhunderthochwassers 2021‘. BEHEMOTH A Journal on Social Dis/Order, 17(1), 115–132. https://doi.org/10.6094/behemoth.2024.17.1.1112