Liliana Doganova
Working at the intersection of economic sociology and the sociology of science and technology, Liliana Doganova explores financial and economic devices that involve valuations of the future. Her research on the ways uncertainty and the future are understood ranges from forest management to drug development. She is particularly interested in comparative economic forms that organize finance capital and technological as well as environmental investments today. While at Remarque/TEFE, she will be working on new varieties of temporal appropriation in the valuation of natural resources, focusing on forestry and gold mining.
Prof. Doganova’s book, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology, is forthcoming with Zone Books in February 2024, and is expected to reset several conversations around neoliberalism and the use of the future as a valuation principle in calculating investments and organizing policy. Born in Bulgaria, Doganova is associate professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) of Mines Paris at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) in France.
Andrew Fitzmaurice
Andrew Fitzmaurice is a leading historian of empire and law, who has written pioneering works on the way law was used to organize American colonization; the British empire’s overseas domains, especially British sovereignty over indigenous peoples; and the Belgian King Leopold II's brutal control of the Congo. He has been instrumental in debates over rights, corporations and company-states, and the landmark Mabo decision concerning indigenous rights and property in Australia. He is currently working in a project on law and the colonization of outer space. He bridges for us imperial and legal history with the technologies (state- and private-owned) that control extraterrestrial mining and property, and that will determine humanity’s future, all the while being acutely aware of the deeply problematic fantasies about outer space. His project is central to the question of Europe’s technological marginalization (and compensatory responses) and to questions over the law of extraterritorial environments and lunar mining. Fitzmaurice is a professor of history at Queen Mary University of London; his books include King Leopold’s Ghostwriter (2022), and Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 1500-2000 (2014). He was born in Perth, Australia and lives and works in London.
Jonas Knatz
Jonas Knatz is an intellectual and social historian who works on automation in the postwar period, with a focus on Germany; he attends to the way that automation of the workplace was and is discussed in the public sphere. His expertise will be instrumental in unfolding the effects of technology in the Technology, the Environment, and the Future of Europe project. Knatz is a PhD student at New York University, and has received a host of fellowships and awards in Germany, the US, and Switzerland. He was born in Kassel, Germany, and is visiting researcher at the Chair for the History of Technology at the Technical University in Darmstadt. He teaches at NYU, where he is a doctoral candidate in the History Department.
Orestis Kostantas
Orestis Konstantas was accepted as a fellow in Remarque’s regular “competition.” A non-academic, he has worked as an architect for over a decade and currently working as a researcher in the social sciences. Born in Athens, he holds an MA from the University of London and an MSc and PhD from the University of Athens. He is a specialist in social analysis of space and his current research focuses on the transformation of the rural landscape by large-scale industrial land uses and depopulation in Greece, a context of extraordinary importance given the ongoing economic dependence on fossil fuels and their contribution to climate change. He examines the contemporary transformations of the subjective perception of the landscape and the restructuring of social space, and the clash between them, along with the politics of scale, in the context of globalization and climate change.
Andreas Malm
Andreas Malm is a human ecologist whose work has mostly focused on various aspects of the climate crisis. His forthcoming book, together with Wim Carton, Overshoot: Climate Politics When It's Too Late, investigates the options proposed for dealing with the now likely transgression of the 1.5 degrees limit to to global warming – adaptation, carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering – as well as the drivers of the unrelenting expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. His next project is an extensive study of the uses of wild spaces in social struggles, from pharaonic Egypt to anti-colonial movements, with the working title, Follow the River: A People's History of Wilderness. Malm is an associate professor at the human ecology division, Lund University, Sweden.
Daniela Russ
Daniela Russ is a sociologist who works on a history of the energy economy from the perspective of a critical theory of nature. Rather than naturalizing the concept of energy or treating it as a mere ideology, she seeks to historicize its materiality: her research focuses on how engineers, scientists and economists have dealt with unruly natural forces and transformed them into calculable and comparable sources of work. She examines this reification, and nature's resistance to it, in a series of studies ranging from the valuation of coal and the calculation of electrical systems to the rise of energy accounting in the second half of the twentieth century. Her book, Working Nature: Steam, Power and the Failure of the Energy Economy is currently under review. A second book project focuses on the theory and practice of energy planning in the Soviet Union and the visions of emancipation associated with it. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Daniela Russ is an assistant professor at the Institute for Global and European Studies at the University of Leipzig.