Verena Gresz is a PhD student at the Institute for Political Science (IfP) at the University of Tübingen since October 2022 where she forms part of the Team “Political Struggles in the Global South”.

She holds a B.A. in Political Science and a M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Hamburg. From July 2020 to July 2022, Verena Gresz worked as a student assistant for the chair of Political Science, particularly Global Governance as well as a research assistant for the CLICCS B2 project “Dynamics of Climate Governance: Norms, Contestation, and Policies”. She supported the project team in teaching and research activities, among others in the processing of fieldwork data from the COP26 in Glasgow. Verena is also a dance artist and youth worker engaged in intercultural youth projects. In her role as project coordinator and educator she seeks to foster transnational exchange and environmental awareness through creative and artistic methods.

In her PhD project, Verena analyses performative engagements with the concept of Loss & Damage as knowledge practices between UN climate negotiations and lived experiences of environmental crises. To do so, she combines the use of Social-Network-Analysis, Hybrid Ethnography, and Critical Arts-Based Action Research. Whereby she brings diverse ways of knowing environmental harm to the fore and explores the potential of fruitful alliances between sciences and arts for transformative climate action. 

Research Foci:

• Global Climate Governance, Loss & Damage
• Critical Development Studies
• Ethnographic Methods in Political Science, particularly IR
• Digital Social Research, anthropological approaches to Big Data and Digital Ethnography in particular
• Decolonial Thought, Latin American Social Theory
• Participatory-Action-Research, Arts-based-methods in particular