Sketch by Maxime Le Calvé
Anja Klein successfully defended her PhD thesis, Doing difference, materiality and complexity with simulation models: An ethnography of modeling social-ecological relations in interdisciplinary sustainability research.
The thesis explored the epistemological, ontological, and ethical dimensions of modelling in interdisciplinary sustainability research. Anja employed the metaphor of “patchwork” to simultaneously highlight their specificity, generativity, creativity, relationality and open-endedness. The thesis provides reflections to engage with interdisciplinary knowledge production in the Anthropocene and to explore further how modeling and ethnographic methods and representations can work together in knowing a world in transformation. The ethnography ranges from accompanying and observing a modeler in his concrete everyday work of collecting data for a flood model while forging connections with people living in the Volta Delta that situate his work to collaborating with a research group in Stockholm in developing an altogether new modeling method, relation-based modeling.
She completed her doctorate at the Institute for European Ethnology under the supervision of Jörg Niewöhner and Tobias Krüger. Her defense took place on 7 November 2025, and she received Summa cum laude.
Congratulations to Anja on this outstanding achievement!
