Prof. Dr. Ina Dietzsch

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
― Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs And Women The Reinvention Of Nature

Ina Dietzsch is full professor and executive director at the Institute for European Ethnology and Culture and History at University of Marburg (since 2020). Moreover she is scientific project manager in the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project "Visual Communication in Participatory Urban Development Processes" at the University of Basel and the School of Art and Design FHNW (since 2018), cielab.ch

Her work is focused on mathematization/digitization of and with “nature”, multimodal and collaborative ethnographies and historical perspectives on (everyday life) technologies. She has a particular interest in theoretical thinking about and with complexity. Her current research is on water issues, water narratives, water practices and water ontologies. Further information

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Curriculum vitae

  From 2018 to 2020, Ina Dietzsch was scientific coordinator of the SNSF project "Negotiating, converting and interconnecting life in digital agriculture" at the University of Basel, where she also completed her habilitation in 2015. After her PhD at Humboldt University of Berlin (2000), she held post-doc positions as research associate at the University of Basel (2013-2017), as scientific project manager of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)-Project "Informality, Trust and Mistrust in Societies in Transition" at Humboldt University of Berlin and as research associate at Durham University (2006-2009), she acted as a chair at the Seminar for Cultural Studies and European Ethnology at the University of Basel (2013/14 and 2017-2019) and the Institute of Sociology at Technical University of Dresden (2015/16).

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  2022
  
  Ina Dietzsch interviewed by Carsten Wilhelm in the special issue "Culture.s of Technics, innovation and communication: imaginaries, potentialities, utopias" der Interfaces numériques Volume 11 - No. 1 | 2022 
  
  Link to Special Issue "Culture.s of Technics, innovation and communication: imaginaries, potentialities, utopias"
  

  2017
  
  Calculating spaces: digital encounters with maps and geodata. (Gemeinsam mit Daniel Kunzelmann). In: Koch, Gertraud (Ed.): Digitization. Handbook of theories and concepts for empirical cultural research. Routledge, 209-229.
  
  Online Publication

  2014
  
  Life worlds of deceleration. An addition to the ´new mobilities paradigm´. In: Burrell, Kathy/Hoerschelmann, Kathrin (eds.) (2014): Socialist and Post-socialist Mobilities. Palgrave Macmillan, 240-259.
  
  Abstract:
  This paper is about mobility and its pace. There is a basic assumption that modern societies are societies of increased mobility and acceleration (Rosa 2010; Sheller and Urry 2006; Bauman 2000). This assumption is embedded in the cardinal modern paradigm of eternal growth which apparently unabashedly determines economic processes, political action, cultural values and moral geographies. However, within the European framework of many unclear, contradictory and continuously changing regulations and processes and within ‘fragmented law zones’ (such as EU, the Eurozone or Schengen area) without one single centre of political decision making (Faludi 2008) we have to ask how people generate their own, more complex European geographies (Hess 2006: 115), mobilities and time regimes. Referring to Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing, the argument I will make in this chapter is led by the basic assumption that mobilities come to life in ‘frictions’ (Tsing 2004). Tsing argues that, [s]peaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. … Roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works: Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing. (ibid.: 6)
  
  Online Publication

  2009
  
  Perceptions of Decline: Crisis, Shrinking and Disappearance as Narrative Schemas to Describe Social and Cultural Change. In: Annual Yearbook, Inst. de Ist. „G. Bariţ” din Cluj-Napoca, Series Humanistica, tom. 1 VII, 2009, 147–176.
  
  Online Publication