24 April 2025

Photo: Liburkina

Public lecture by Dr. habil. Tanja Bogusz at the Institute Colloquium of the Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies

Marine Social Sciences (MSS) emerged around the 2010s in response to the urgent need for social and cultural science expertise on the ecological crisis of the world's oceans and the increasingly polarizing conflicts of interest that accompany it. In Germany, too, MSS has successfully established itself within the German Marine Research Consortium (KDM) and the German Alliance for Marine Research (DAM). It now faces the particular challenge of professionalizing collaborative work with the marine natural sciences in a problem-oriented manner (Bogusz et al. 2024). Against this backdrop, I present the emerging “sociology of the sea” (Bogusz 2024) based on “theoretical ethnography” (Kalthoff & Hirschauer 2022) using the example of a study on sea-human relations at the Concarneau marine station in Brittany, France (Bogusz 2023). Finally, I will reflect on what sociology can learn from both marine sciences and empirical cultural studies, and what its independent contribution within MSS is, using “democratic experimentalism” (Dewey 1996) and STS methodologies as a basis for social theory and discussion.

Websites on MSS and Marine STS

https://www.deutsche-meeresforschung.de/strategie/strategiegruppen/sozialwissenschaften/

https://marinestsing.com/

See the full program for the institute colloquium here