Franziska von Verschuer
studied Sociology and Psychology in Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main. She is a Research Associate in the “Biotechnologies, Nature and Society” Research Group in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Her research interests include critical science and technology studies, feminist theory and technoscience studies, post-anthropocentric sociology and the ecological humanities. She is currently working on her PhD thesis, which focuses on techno-scientific solutionism in the face of ecological crises, exemplarily investigating seed conservation against biodiversity loss.
Publications
Core Publications
Hoppe, K., Rüppel, J., von Verschuer, F. & Voigt, T. H. (eds.) (2023). Leben Regieren. Natur, Technologie und Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt/Main: Campus.
Hoppe, K., Rüppel, J., von Verschuer, F. & Voigt, T. H. (2023). Einleitung: Leben Regieren. In Hoppe, K., Rüppel, J., von Verschuer, F. & Voigt, T. H. (eds.), Leben Regieren. Natur, Technologie und Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 11-34.
von Verschuer, F. (2021). How to take care of the plants that feed the world? Zur Versammlung naturkultureller Zukünfte in Saatgutbanken. In Blättel-Mink, B. (ed.), Gesellschaft unter Spannung. Verhandlungen des 40. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie 2020, published online: 30 September 2021.
von Verschuer, F. (2019). Freezing lives, preserving humanism: cryonics and the promise of dezoefication. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 21 (2), 143–161.
Most recent
von Verschuer, F., Hartmann, V. & Barla, J. (2023). Um/Ordnungen des Lebens: Konturen einer dekolonialen Analytik ökologischer Krisen. In Hoppe, K., Rüppel, J., von Verschuer, F. & Voigt, T. H. (eds.), Leben Regieren. Natur, Technologie und Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 37-54.
von Verschuer, F. (2022). Dis/continuities of extractivism in conservationism: The case of seed banking. Berliner Gazette, published online: 6 October 2022.
Barla, J., von Verschuer, F. (2022). Almanac: Anthropocene. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2 (3), 137–143.
von Verschuer, F. (2021). Making post/anthropocentric futures in agrobiodiversity conservation, Nature and Culture, 16 (1), 47–64.
Research
Governing Agrobiodiversity. Inquiring the world/ings of ex situ seed conservation [working title] (PhD project)
In the wake of the mid-twentieth century global modernization of agriculture, a global ecological problem took shape that is conspicuously underrecognized by the public to this day: the loss of genetic diversity in agricultural plants. Transnational agropolitical actors such as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) made ex situ conservation of plant genetic diversity in seed banks their core strategy to counteract agrobiodiversity loss and ensure future food security. However, seed banks and their stocks are exposed to a variety of threats ranging from natural disasters to wars and more mundane threats such as financial and capacity limits. The resulting need for a global backup system marked the birth of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), an international backup storage facility established on the Arctic island of Spitzbergen in the Svalbard archipelago in 2008.
My PhD research is an inquiry into the world of agrobiodiversity conservation, starting from the SGSV, which I consider as a nodal point of global ex situ conservation efforts. Based on ethnographic field research, qualitative expert interviews, and document analysis, I explore the rationalities and more-than-human relationalities that make the world of agrobiodiversity conservation. Seed banking thus becomes discernible as not merely a technoscientific promise of salvation in the face of existential crisis, but rather as a technoscientific mode of world-making, of negotiating futurity between the poles of caring for and governing naturecultures. The theoretical environment that my research is situated in and contributes to reaches from post-anthropocentric approaches in sociology to feminist and decolonial science and technology studies to debates on political ontology.