Dr. Thilo Wiertz
Geography
Member of the Young Academy for Sustainability Research
October 2021 - September 2024
CV
Thilo Wiertz is a Human Geographer and post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Social Sciences and Geography, University of Freiburg. He obtained his PhD in 2015 from the University of Heidelberg where, as member of an interdisciplinary research group at the Marsilius Kolleg, he studied the Global Governance of Climate Engineering. From 2015 until 2017, he worked as a project scientist at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, facilitating the engagement between science and society around topics such as Climate Engineering and Arctic Sustainability. His research on Climate Engineering explores how computer simulations have changed global perspectives on the environment, and how they inspire visions of technological climate control. Drawing heavily on assemblage theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, his recent research crosses boundaries between political geography, discourse studies and science and technology studies to interrogate the ‘digital geopolitics’ of far-right activism, biopolitics of migration and borders, and geopolitical dimensions of mobile energy storage systems.
Selected Publications
- Heyen, Daniel, Thilo Wiertz, and Peter James Irvine. 2015. ‘Regional Disparities in SRM Impacts: The Challenge of Diverging Preferences’. Climatic Change 133 (4): 557–563. doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1526-8.
- Mattissek, Annika, and Thilo Wiertz. 2014. ‘Materialität Und Macht Im Spiegel Der Assemblage-Theorie: Erkundungen Am Beispiel Der Waldpolitik in Thailand’. Geographica Helvetica, no. 69: 157–169. doi:10.5194/gh-69-157-2014.
- Wiertz, Thilo. 2016a. ‘Visions of Climate Control: Solar Radiation Management in Climate Simulations’. Science, Technology & Human Values 41 (3): 438–460. doi:10.1177/0162243915606524.
- Wiertz, Thilo. 2016b. ‘Technology and Politics in the Anthropocene: Visions of “Solar Radiation Management”’. In Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics, edited by Shannon O’Lear and Simon Dalby, 116–131. New York: Routledge.
- Wiertz, Thilo. 2020. ‘Biopolitics of Migration: An Assemblage Approach’. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39 (7): 1375–1388. doi:10.1177/2399654420941854.
- Wiertz, Thilo, and Tobias Schopper. 2019. ‘Theoretische und methodische Perspektiven für eine Diskursforschung im digitalen Raum: Die Bundestagswahl 2017 auf Twitter’. Geographische Zeitschrift 107 (4): 254–281. doi:10.25162/gz-2019-0008.
- Wiertz, Thilo, and Tobias Schopper. 2022. ‘Geographien von Wahlkampf, Medien Und Gewalt: Extrem Rechte Bewegungen Aus Assemblagetheoretischer Perspektive’. Geographica Helvetica 77 (3): 345–356. doi:10.5194/gh-77-345-2022.
YAS-Projects
- Political and Legal Discourses on Energy Security in Germany (with Rike Sinder)
- H2info: An Online Information Tool for the German Hydrogen Transition (with Severin Vierrath and Benjamin Schütze)
- Transnational dimensions of energy transitions: Politics and Inequalities in and beyond Latin America and West Asia-North Africa’, hybrid workshop at FRIAS, 2-3 June 2022 (with Benjamin Schütze (YAS), Alke Jenss (ABI) and Rosa Lehmann (HCIAS))
- Transformative talk? The sustainability discourses of international organisations (with Matthias Kranke)
- Transnational solar power networks (with Cristina Espinosa, Matthias Kranke and Benjamin Schütze)
Other projects & third-party funding
- Digital Geopolitics: Geopolitische Leitbilder der „Neuen Rechten“ in digitalen Medien (Digital Geopolitics: Geopolitical Imaginations of the Far Right in Digital Media), funded by the German Research Foundation, 2021–2024
- Political Geographies of the German Energy Transition (2022–)
- Political Geography at the Interface of Society, Nature & Technology: An Assemblage Theory Approach (Habilitation, 2021-2024)