Georg Schäfer

Georg N. Schäfer is a doctoral candidate of sociology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He completed his BA in Governance and Public Policy at the University of Passau and the Lahore University of Management and Sciences. In 2019, Georg graduated from Kiel University with an MA in Practical Philosophy of the Economy and the Environment and an MSc in Sustainability, Society and the Environment, after spending a year studying at the University of Kansas. He joined the research project “Ethics and Human Rights as Elements for Economic Knowledge” at Free University Bolzano. This work resulted in the monograph Mapping Mainstream Economics: Genealogical Foundations of Alternativity (Routledge, 2022), co-authored with Sören E. Schuster. Following this, Georg became the scientific coordinator of the Evidence & Experiment program at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In February 2021, he enlisted in the Anthropocene Formations working group within Department I of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science (MPIWG) to extend the work on his PhD project, in which he explores the regional agency of Kansas in the human-planetary production dynamics of the Anthropocene. His work reflects on the emergence of industrialized agriculture in Kansas, the worldwide exportation of this agricultural model, and the factors that lock Kansas into this anthropocenic mode of production. The PhD project is supervised by Jürgen Renn and Hartmut Rosa.