Stefan Aykut is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg since May 2017 and has been awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for Young Career Researchers by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2019. Previously, he studied social and political sciences as well as history of science at the Free University of Berlin, Sabanci University Istanbul and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris (EHESS). He obtained a doctorate at EHESS in 2012 on the topic "How to govern a new global risk? The construction of climate change as a public problem in Germany and France, at the European and global level" (original in French). This was followed by postdoctoral positions at LATTS and LISIS (both Université Paris-Est MLV) and stays as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Sociology at TU Berlin and at the Centre Marc Bloch at HU Berlin.

Felix Schenuit explores in his PhD the role of science in political decision making processes in the context bottom-up UN climate governance regime. He particularly focuses on the Special Report on 1.5°C Global Warming by the IPCC and emerging carbon dioxide removal policymaking.

Emilie D'Amico explores in her PhD the evolutions of climate governance after the Paris Agreement, focusing on the role of cities and their transnational cooperation through networks in reaching the net-zero emissions target.

The central subject of research at the professorship is to better understand the social and political dimensions of ecological crises - especially climate change. On the one hand, we examine how ecological problems are scientifically interpreted, how socioecological conflicts are politically processed and how they are sometimes channeled into processes of social change.

On the other hand, we study new forms of social coordination that emerge in such transformations, and which link different types of actors (state, civil society), levels of governance (global, national, local) and dimensions of authority (political, private, epistemic).

Empirically, the focus is on studies on global climate governance, on transformation processes in the energy sector in Europe (especially Germany and France), as well as on the institutionalisation of global ecological limits or planetary boundaries in various societal sub-sectors (energy, finance, legal systems). Conceptually and methodologically, this research is characterised by a combination of political sociology and environmental sociology, science and technology studies (STS) and ethnography.