Associated researcher

Franziska von Verschuer studied Sociology and Psychology in Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main. She is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Her research interests include science and technology studies, feminist theory and technoscience studies, posthuman(ist) theory and the environmental humanities. In her PhD project, she explores (agro)biodiversity conservation technologies, more specifically the practice of seed banking. The study is based on multi-sited ethnographic field research starting out at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the remote island of Spitsbergen. It considers seed banks as ontopolitical technologies of government which produce their objects of concern and assemble specific possible futures. In addition, it further investigates the ways in which seed banks care for the naturecultures they produce.