Ingmar Lippert's book shelf
Ingmar Lippert

Ingmar Lippert

Teams and leadership

I am a team worker, performing in, and organising, collaborative teaching and research within the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology's team at Frankfurt University (since 2023). 2019 to 2023 I co-led the research project Sociocultural Carbon. For several years I have been involved in the DataNatures team at the Museum of Natural History Berlin, the TiP research group at IT University of Copenhagen and the Chair of Technoscience Studies at Brandenburg University of Technology.

Since the early 2000s, I have been leading several early career researcher teams, including the international doctoral/postdoc ‘Environment, Management and Society Research Group’, drawing into these teams multiple awards, grants and producing publications.

Across the teams and my or our grants, my responsibilities included project management, drafting and administrating budgets, subcontractor management, planning and managing the logistics of ethnographic fieldwork on two continents, coordinating scheduled delivery of research output to funders, supervising PhD students and intellectually guiding PostDocs as well as evaluating progress. In leading teams, I explore modes of collaborative relations and building nurturing environments, drawing on my training in listening and noticing to guide open development.

Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology - my home for doing STS in Germany

The Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology is a place at Frankfurt University that is characterised by its shaping of and through ethnographic STS. In my research and teaching I focus on infrastructures for governing green transitions as well as on the method assemblages and analytical resources for such research. Together with Gisela Welz and Martina Klausner, I perform leadership in structuring and revising our German language Bachelor degree programme in Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology and our postgraduate Master degree programme in Science and Technology Studies. My research at the institute continues the development of STS research on STS methods, at the core of my work on methods and matters of STS. Knowledge infrastructures are key to my own as well as collaborative research; centrally we consider the politics of socio-technical infrastructures for heritage and knowledge management, including their data practices.

Sociocultural Carbon

Sociocultural Carbon, SOCCAR, was a 4-year (2019-2023) research project hosted by IT University of Copenhagen, aimed at gaining a novel understanding of the social and cultural challenges and values of living with 'carbon' in the form of emission data. As Co-Principal Investigator, I structure STS and sociological input into the project, with a specific expertise of data practices. Together with the PI, Steffen Dalsgaard, I supervise the projects' two PhD students, Andy Lautrup Sørensen and Katinka A. Schyberg. Within SOCCAR, I conduct research on energy transition, lignite coal mining and the the frictions of remembering coal, nature and Sorbic heritage, feeding into my work on energy knowledges.
Selected Output
  • "'Earth ... without us', earthlessness and autochthony: discursive presences and absences in negotiating and contesting coal mining", presented at the workshop Equivocal (anthropo)cenes: indigenous ontologies and the ethics of geo-climatic disruption at Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, 8th-9th of November 2018
  • "Die diskursive Konstruktion von Partizipation einer autochthonen Volksgruppe in der Braun kohlegovernance", presented at the Spring Conference Partizipation und die Gestaltung von Natur-Gesellschafts-Verhältnissen of the section Environmental Sociology of the German Sociological Association (DGS), Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, 11th April 2019
Third-party Funding

DataNatures

DataNatures was a long-term research programme spirited in the Bureau for troubles and hosted by the Science & Technology Studies unit at the Museum of Natural History Berlin's Humanities of Nature unit. The programme was concerned with the museum as an epistemic assemblage when it 'goes digital', exploring the reconfiguration of nature when natures like biodiversity or climate are enacted in datascapes. I joined Tahani Nadim in 2016 as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow and link the conversations about the politics of and in biodiversity data to STS scholarship of climate, carbon and energy data. I explored the diffractions of the infrastructures in which natural history collections are enacted and within which environmental monitoring performs evidence for governance. My work in this team sat at the intersection of research on data practices and of environmental management.

Technologies in Practice Research Group

Technologies in Practice, TiP, is a research group at the IT University of Copenhagen, exploring the intersections of IT and society with qualitative studies of technologically mediated practices in organisations and everyday life. 2019-2022, as Associate Professor, I was involved in the group's climate policy unit and have acted as co-PI of our project Sociocultural Carbon (till 2023). 2014-2018, as Assistant Professor, I organised interdisciplinary research team-building workshops, taught and (co)developed foundational modules on Digital Accountability and on Society & Technology. In partnership with Rachel Douglas-Jones and TiP's ETHOS Laboratory, I coordinated innovations in analysing and writing reflexively about methods and data practices in STS research. A key output of my work with the TiP group is a special issue on numbers, numbering and after numbers, which I lead-edited in conversation with Helen Verran.
Selected Output

Environment, Management and Society Research Group

Environment, Management and Society, EMS-RG, was an autonomous research group, operating 2008 to 2016, with the objective to critically scrutinise the limits and practices of practices that are typically associated with the discourses of environmental management and environmental governance. I initiated and facilitated the collective of six docs and postdocs, working aross Europe and Asia, and organised a range of international workshops and conference sessions. As a lead-editor, in collaboration with the collective, we produced two collective publications, an edited book section 'Limits to Managing the Environment' and the special issue 'Environmental Management as Situated Practice'. This group's work is core to my research interest in Environmental Management Studies.
Selected Output
  • "Environmental Management as Situated Practice" Geoforum special issue, edited with Franz Krause and Niklas Hartmann (2015)
    free access via
  • "Latour’s Gaia – Not down to Earth?: Social Studies of Environmental Management for Grounded Understandings of the Politics of Human-Nature Relationships", in: Yearbook 2012 of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (2014)
    free access via
  • "Limits to Managing the Environment" edited book part, in: Implementing Environmental and Resource Management (2011)
    free access via