Climate Futures in Digital Cultures
Scenarios for a sustainable future are being developed in science, industry, politics, and culture in close connection with digital media technologies. Researchers at Leuphana are investigating how these climate futures are constituted, imagined, and shaped in digital cultures. They explore their medial, social, and technological situatedness under the premise that digital media technologies contribute to the climate crisis and at the same time contribute to adaptation and mitigation. In doing so, they update the field of digital cultures with transformative knowledge about anthropogenic climate change and futurity as a (media and socio-)cultural capacity.
Spokespersons: Prof. Dr. Armin Beverungen, and Prof. Dr. Jan Müggenburg
Potential Research Areas
| Field of Research | Description | Potential Supervisors |
| Environmental Histories of Computing | This research area assumes that the histories and epistemologies of computing and the concepts of “nature,” “ecology,” or “sustainability” over the course of the 20th century are intrinsically intertwined. PhD projects within this theme could focus on the ways in which the computer as technology and metaphor was influenced by biological and ecological styles of thinking (e.g. biological computing, green computing, perma-computing), or on historical perspectives and debates on the environmental impact on computers. | Jan Müggenburg, Christina Wessely |
| Smart Cities, Infrastructures and Climate Futures | Cities have become key sites as well as testbeds for imagining climate futures, with smart technologies deployed to create resilient, green cities. Critical scholarship in science and technology and urban studies has demonstrated how these technologies and their accompanying knowledges and practices have been shaped by particular notions of smartness, sustainability and progress, to the detriment of more plural visions of climate futures. Projects within this theme could explore the infrastructural practices, from resource-efficient construction to urban twinning, which seek to establish social and technical capacities for preempting or mitigating climate effects. | Armin Beverungen, Ursula Kirschner |
| Plattformisation of Disaster Management / Climate Adaptation | Digital platforms are increasingly used for disaster management and climate adaptation, most notably in the Global South where implications of global warming are tangible. Examples include the harvesting of mobile and social media data to manage climate migration or data sharing in agricultural projects for developing new modes of sustainable farming. PhD projects within this research theme could explore such examples and research aspects of platformisation therein, such as its promises, questions of accessibility and vulnerability, discrimination and exclusion, as well as its biopolitical dimensions. | Stephan Scheel, Armin Beverungen |
| Environmental Aesthetics, Climate Change and Digital Media | Digital media, including video games, vertical videos, AI generated films, and other forms of contemporary moving images, reflect and shape specific forms of an environmental aesthetic under the conditions of climate change. Concurrently, digital streaming and gaming platforms significantly contribute to and exacerbate climate change. PhD projects in this field investigate concrete environmental aesthetics, formats, and communities in Digital Cultures that address and aim to resolve this paradoxical relationship (e.g. Green Gaming, Serious Games and Sustainability, Sustainability Influencer, Sustainable Film Production). | Jan Müggenburg, Maren Haffke |
| Noise Pollution, Sensory Ecologies and Environmental Media | The measuring and control of environmental sound has been a part of imagining climate futures since the mid 20th century. Noise pollution is today considered to be the second largest environmental health risk in Europe by the WHO, informing plans for urban developing, e-mobility and research on its affects on wildlife. Discourses for example around the noise of data centres point to the materiality and situatedness of digital media and their environmental and energetic costs. PhD projects within this theme could explore the noise of digital media and energy production, the generation and analysis of acoustic sensor data, acoustic ecologies and sensory ecologies. | Maren Haffke, Erich Hörl |
| Climate Histories and Futures in Literature | Climate discourses are intrinsically shaped by heterogeneous narratives. Literature — both historical and contemporary — not only engages with these narratives but also produces its own through specific aesthetic forms, which provide a distinctive mode of access to the historical and future dimensions of climate and its relation to digital cultures, for example in climate fiction. PhD projects to be developed could focus on investigating such forms of literary knowledge and their epistemological potential within climate discourse. | Kevin Drews, Timon Beyes |
| Hardware Afterlives: Cultures of Reuse, Repair and Circularity | Climate futures are negotiated through everyday economic decisions, framed by sociotechnical discourses, practices and affects. While dominant organizational forms have enabled wasteful and unsustainable processes of technology production, circulation and consumption, this theme is dedicated to alternative and emergent forms of technology stewardship. Potential projects within this theme include (and can go beyond) ethnographic and/or comparative and case-study based investigations of hardware circulation, repair and reuse, as well as innovation cultures for more sustainable hardware design. | Timon Beyes, Melissa Gregg (University of Bristol) |
| Ruins in Space, Sustainability and Outer-Space Imaginaries | In relation to the climate crisis, outer space has emerged as an object of speculation and imagination in which digital technologies such as satellite networks and space travel offer both means of managing planetary crises and ways of escaping from it. PhD projects within this research theme could explore these materialized imaginaries, for example space debris and ruins in space as processes that bridge past and future and can render visible how societal and political earthly “remains” are projected and materialized beyond planetary boundaries. | Anna Ramella, Stephan Scheel |
Application Process
| Deadline | Applicants submit all required documents no later than | 01.10.2025 |
| Interviews | Applicants are requested to save the date | 10.-21.11.2025 |
| Notification | Successful applicants will receive notification as of | 24.11.2025 |
| Acceptance | Successful applicants accept the awarded PhD positions no later than | 05.12.2025 |
| Doctoral studies application | Successful scholarship applicants submit their online application for enrollment in Leuphana's doctoral studies no later than | 31.12.2025 |
| Matriculation | Participants are required to matriculate at Leuphana no later than | 01.04.2026 |
| Opening Event | The new PhD researchers are welcomed at Leuphana Graduate School | 02.-03.04.2026 |