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TEMA T fellowship programme "Urban and Regional Climate Transition"

Technology and Social Change's visiting fellowship programme provides guest researchers the opportunity to spend between two weeks and two months at the vibrant interdisciplinary research environment of our department, to have an exchange with researchers at Tema T, participate in our seminars and develop longer-term collaborations. The focus of the fellowship programme is on interdisciplinary perspectives on the ongoing climate crises and themes such as:

  • the role of urban and regional planning in sustainability transitions; new tools and approaches for strategic and transformative planning
  • social transformation and the role of knowledge and politics
  • the governance of socio-technical change; building capacities for transformation
  • the role of social movements, grassroots innovations or energy communities
  • new instruments and strategies for urban transformative change - socio-technical experiments, system demonstrators, reflexive monitoring and evaluation, mission-oriented innovation policies
  • critical analysis of the politics of transition; conflict, controversy and friction in transition processes; questions of justice, equality, democracy and marginalisation in transitions.

Fellowships for the year 2025 have already been decided. There will be a new call for the year 2026. The announcement will be published at this website in June 2025.

If you’re interested, follow updates on this page or get in touch with Harald Rohracher.

Guest researchers 2024

Here we present the fellowship program's guest researchers in 2024.

Catherine Grandclément

Catherine Grandclément, Research Group on Energy, Technology, and Society, EDF (Électricité de France) R&D, Palaiseau, France

Catherine Grandclément is a researcher at the R&D of the French electricity company Électricité de France and an associate lecturer at Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school. She works at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and economic sociology to study consumption technologies. She so examined the self-service selling devices of the supermarket during her PhD which she completed at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation of the Paris School of Mines in 2008. Since then, she has specialized on energy issues. Her work focusses on the embedded politics of small domestic objects such as meters and appliances which act as mediators toward shaping electricity from a basic utility service into a consumer good that increasingly has to be individually chosen, consumed and paid for. She has published in Energy Policy, Journal of Cultural Economy, Distinktion as well as in French journals.
Portrait of Catherine Grandclément
Catherine Grandclément

John Barry

John Barry, Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action, Queens University Belfast, UK

John Barry is a father, a political activist, recovering politician and Professor of Green Political Economy in the Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action at Queens University Belfast. What keeps him awake at night is the life opportunities and future wellbeing of his and other children in this age of the planetary emergency and intersecting social and economic injustices within and between countries. What also keeps him awake at night is the following question: why it is easier for most people to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism and economic growth? His areas of academic-activist research include post-growth and heterodox political economy; decarbonisation and decolonisation; the politics, policy and political economy of climate breakdown and climate resilience; socio-technical analyses of low carbon just energy and sustainability transitions; climate injustice-based nonviolent direct action and social mobilisation; and the overlap between conflict transformation and these sustainability and energy transformations.

His forthcoming book is provisionally entitled, Practicing What You Teach: Anti-Capitalist and Post-Growth Tales of Failing (Forward) from the Molehills of Power and Disciplinary Margins (2025, Agenda Publishers), much of which he wrote at Tema T when he was a visiting fellow in May 2024.
Portrait of John Barry
John Barry

Aleksandra Wagner

Aleksandra Wagner, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Aleksandra Wagner (orcid.org/0000-0002-6465-5597) received her PhD in Sociology in 2008 and works currently as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She co-directs the MA programme in Social Communication. She completed a research fellowship at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge University and recently she was a visiting scholar at Tema T, Linköping University. She is a scientific consultant in the Capturing Invisible® Lab (https://imagine-future.project.uj.edu.pl/) and a founder of the Chill&Plug social innovation app connecting prosumers with e-mobility users. She is a leader of the Dialogue for Policy research group and a board member of Research Network 12 "Society and Environment" in the European Sociological Association.  Since 2014 she has co-organised the biennial conference on "Energy and Society". She has worked as a work package leader and co-leader in 5 international research projects (Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, Blue Economy European Partnership,Oxford Noble Foundation).

Aleksandra's research interests focus on social aspects of energy transitions, socio-technical change and energy discourses. She has published two books: Trust in Media: Press Self-Descriptions in Crisis Situations and Visible and Invisible: Nuclear Energy, Shale Gas and Wind Power in Polish Media Discourse, as well as numerous chapters on energy discourses and public dialogue. She has authored and co-authored several research papers published in Energy Policy, Energy Research and Social Science, Science and Public Policy, Nature+Culture, Sociology of Health and Illness, Social Science and Medicine, Future, Current Sociology, Frontiers in Energy Research.
Portrait of Aleksandra Wagner,
Aleksandra Wagner

Gerald Taylor Aiken

Gerald Taylor Aiken, Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research & Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Munich

I am a human geographer who researches community-based environmentalism. I take up the question of community because it is my contention that togetherness—specifically community—is crucial to finding a way to live well in an ecologically damaged world. I carry out engaged ethnographic research with a variety of community-based environmentally concerned citizens across the global North. However, the forms that community takes are capacious. Community has a wide array of meanings, both progressive and regressive. I have looked at community energy, community green spaces, community infrastructure provision and a variety of other community-based projects. Community can be used as a carapace, to exclude difference and to produce a homogenous, exclusive sense of belonging. Community, concurrently, can be used with a sense of porosity, a heterogenous and amorphous feeling of belonging which is defined not by identity but by an orientation, and a desire to pursue certain tasks. Specifically, I see the translation of community action into community policy as a moment where certain aspects of community which are often latent, pre-reflective, invisible, can be grasped and understood. It is in the tracing and analysing of how community transforms that I am focusing my analytical lens.
Portrait of Gerald Taylor Aiken
Gerald Taylor Aiken

Kathryn Furlong

Kathryn Furlong, Université de Montréal, Canada

Kathryn Furlong is a professor in Geography and academic director of the Center for International Studies (CÉRIUM) at the Université de Montréal. She held the Canada Research Chair in Water and Urbanization from 2011–2021 and acted as the co-director for the Ethics and Environment axis of the Center for Research on Ethics (CRÉ) from 2014–2021. Her research focusses on the political ecology of public services, infrastructure and urbanization, with a particular focus on debt and financialization. She is currently completing two book projects. The first, The Miracle of Debt: Medellín “Metropolis de Servicios”, examines the relationship between miracles and crises in political economy and the entanglement of wealth and debt therein. The second, Maîtres chez eux: Churchill Falls, la fondation d’Hydro-Québec au Labrador (PUM, submitted 2022), co-authored with Martine Verdy and Camila Patino, examines the ongoing legacies of a little discussed dam project developed in northern Canada in the 1970s.
Portrait of Kathryn Furlong
Kathryn Furlong

Angela Mae Minas

Angela Mae Minas, Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), The University of Manchester, UK

Dr Angela Minas is a social scientist based at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. Her work focuses on climate action and global development, with the aim to co-develop strategies with local communities, policy, and industry. She has extensive experience in low carbon energy and agriculture and has worked on a number of projects in Southeast Asia and Africa. She currently leads a British Academy-funded project exploring climate resilient development in the Global South. Her recent projects with the UK’s Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations focus on the role of grassroots movements and local governments in delivering carbon reduction.
Portrait of Angela Mae Minas
Angela Mae Minas Photographer: JILL JENNINGS

Klaus Kubeczko

Klaus Kubeczko is Senior Expert Advisor and scientist at the Center for Innovation Systems and Policy at the Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna and holds a doctoral degree in socio-economics with focus on institutional and ecological economics. His research focus is on sustainability transitions of provisioning-systems like energy, mobility and ICT and how new instruments of socio-technical innovation policy, like regulatory experimenting and sandboxes, contribute to the development of transformation pathways and the governance of multiple transformations. With more than 20 years of expertise in policy analysis and participatory strategic foresight, he builds bridges between the world of transdisciplinary research and policy making at multiple levels, from the regional to the European and international level. Among other advisory roles, he leads the working group on Smart Grid Transition of the International Smart Grid Action Network (IEA-ISGAN) based on his background and work experience in engineering.

https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-4395-7983
Portrait of Klaus Kubeczko
Klaus Kubeczko

Philipp Späth

Philipp Späth is associate professor at the Institute of Environmental Social Sciences and Geography of Freiburg University and heads a research group on Urban Sustainability Governance there.

Trained as a geographer and political scientist, he has obtained a PhD in Science and Technology Studies in 2009 and a venia legendi in Environmental Governance and Urban Studies in 2016. Since the early 2000s, Philipp studies how socio-technical systems change: how obduracies emerge or are created, how agency and the potential for democratic governance emerge or can be created. Complementing a longstanding interest in multi-level governance dynamics, he recently often asks how calls for a justice-orientation of urban governance and energy transitions could be translated into truly inclusive policies.

Further research interests:

  • visions, governance and contestation of energy transitions
  • justice-orientation of (urban) environmental governance
  • post-colonial energy partnerships
  • real time data in urban infrastructure management and democratic conduct
  • transdisciplinary research – approaches, methods, challenges
Portrait of Philipp Späth
Philipp Späth

Itay Fishhendler

Itay Fishhendler is professor at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Department of Geography.

Itay's research interests focus on environmental conflict resolution, natural resources governance, and decision-making under conditions of political and environmental uncertainties. He is a leading scholar on transboundary water institutions and Middle Eastern water policy, and has published over 70 articles in leading public policy, conflict resolution, peace studies, geography, ecological economics, and environmental journals. Itay is now engaged in research related to the politics of energy infrastructure and energy diplomacy, including energy sanctions. Many of Itay’s studies take a critical approach, often by the use of discourse analysis and content analysis, of planning and building protocols of national infrastructure, such as energy and water.
Portrait of Itay Fishhendler
Itay Fishhendler

Cordula Kropp

Cordula Kropp is professor at the University of Stuttgart and director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Research (ZIRIUS).

Her research focuses on infrastructure changes in society (e.g. energy system transformation, transport transformation, computerization of architecture), the participatory development of sustainable cities and regions (from urban gardening to smart cities) and on controversial perceptions of risk and technology as well as risk communication. Within ZIRIUS, she is working on sociotechnical transformations for the energy and mobility turnaround with a focus on conceptual approaches to integrating technical, social and ecological requirements. A further focus is on innovative participation formats for citizens and stakeholders, which are developed and implemented in real-life laboratories.
Portrait of Cordula Kropp
Cordula Kropp

Claudio Coletta

Claudio Coletta works as an Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna, Department of Philosophy.

His research is in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), with a particular focus on the relationship between digital infrastructures, organizational processes, climate change, and urban transformations, using ethnographic/qualitative approaches. He is part of the research group in Governance Of and By Infrastructures (GOBI) at the Department of Philosophy. From 2020 to 2023 he has been recipient of a MSCA-IF Global Fellowship, with the project INFRATIME - Infrastructuring Time in Smart Urbanism and Urban Transitions (infratime.eu).
Portrait of Claudio Coletta
Claudio Coletta

Peter Cox

Peter Cox Is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Chester, UK.

He is author of a number of books including Cycling: a sociology of vélomobility (Routledge 2019), Cycling Activism: bike politics and social movements (Routledge 2024) and the forthcoming Anthropocene Mobilities: walking, cycling and caring for the commons (Bloomsbury 2025).
Portrait of Peter Cox

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Bilden visar byggnadsarbetare. Workers in sunset.

Technology and Social Change (TEMAT)

So much of our lives depend on technology. The development and use of technology creates possibilities as well as social, ethical and political dilemmas. That’s what we study at Tema T – Technology and Social Change.
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Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA)

In an increasingly complicated world, there is a need for researchers that can handle both breadth and depth, and can collaborate across disciplinary borders. Major societal questions are studied from an interdisciplinary perspective at TEMA.

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