Work-in-Progress Seminar: Towards an Ethnography of Mediterranean Critical Zones | Sensing & Sense-Making of Socio-Environmental Injustice through Multidisciplinary Community-based Research and Interventions

Person(s) Christoph Lange

Date/Time April 21, 2026 12-1pm

Location GSSC - Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24, 3rd floor, 50931 Cologne

Information:

In this seminar, Christoph Lange introduces the concept of Mediterranean Critical Zones (MCZ) as the underlying framework of his current postdoctoral research project.

The project aims at developing a heuristic toolkit for integrating ethnography and environmental anthropology with environmental humanities, and Earth system approaches to socio-environmental change and interventions.

Building on the notion of “nested Mediterranean zones” (Holdermann et al 2020), the project reconceptualizes the Mediterranean not as a bounded region, but as a dynamic assemblage of overlapping ecological, political, and infrastructural formations. These zones are increasingly shaped by global environmental change, resource scarcity, and enduring colonial asymmetries, making the Mediterranean a key site for studying socio-environmental injustice.

By proposing an ethnography of Mediterranean Critical Zones that bridges Critical Zone science with ethnographic practice, the project contributes to rethinking how environmental change is sensed, governed, and contested.

Methodologically, it advances multidisciplinary, community-based research and intervention formats, including temporary field laboratories that function as experimental spaces for sensing, co-producing, and translating situated knowledge across actors and disciplines.

The project draws on comparative case studies in Egypt and Lebanon that links regional partners across the Mediterranean to develop actionable, transdisciplinary knowledge, thus positioning the anthropologist and their research as key actors in addressing the ecological imperatives of the so-called Anthropocene.