tob.wagner@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Short Vita
Tobias Wagner (he/him) completed his BA in Philosophy and his MA in Sociology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Starting in 2023 he is a PhD candidate at the Fixing Futures graduate college. His research interests lie in feminist and de-/ anti-colonial epistemologies, invasion ecology, environmental humanities and STS.
Project Description
My PhD project is an inquiry into the naturecultural history of the Pacific oyster (Magallana gigas) colonizing the Wadden Sea around the island of Sylt, Germany. Brought to the island for the purposes of aquaculture in 1986, it was assumed that the mollusc would be unable to reproduce in the North Sea due to its low temperatures, but it nonetheless established a population, settling on the local blue mussels. This sparked serious concerns in the early 2000s of the oyster displacing the mussels, leading to the oyster being labelled as an invasive alien species in 2013. However, the oyster again subverted expectations, by cohabitating with the blue mussels, building so-called oyssel reefs, a mix of oyster reefs and mussel banks in which both species thrive. Although this introduction of a new habitat in the form of those reefs constitutes a severe change to the Wadden Sea, it did facilitate the arrival of more new species, some of them considered invasive, but also of species that were previously thought extinct.
Investigating this case, I draw on feminist epistemology to call into question what counts as nature around Sylt, the limits of Western ways of technoscientific knowledge-making, and how to live in good relations acknowledging how nature denies human attempts at apprehension, without essentialising or romanticizing the biophysical world.