Responsibilities
Teaching: Lectures, Seminars, and Research Courses
Consulting Bachelor, Masters, and Ph.D. students on a variety of topics (see below)
Research: human-environmental relations; controversial technologies in agriculture: biotechnology, indoor vertical farming, digitization/AI; regenerative agriculture; farm-hackers; imagined food futures; care for soil. Art as research and science communication method; public engagement in science and technology; farmer-researcher collaborations, interdisciplinary research methods.
Mascha Gugganig is a social and cultural anthropologist, a science & technology studies (STS) scholar, and a curator for research exhibitions on contested agricultural and food technologies – including biotechnology, indoor vertical farming and digital tools – as well as ‘smartification’ more generally. Her most recent research is concerned with the role of digitization, (s)low-tech and innovation in ‘sustainable agriculture’ according to farmers, farm tool tinkerers, and policymakers.
In the past, she was the Principal Investigator of the EU research and communication project "Cultivating Engagement: a citizen participation forum on vertical farming" (funded by EIT Food, 2017-2018). From 2019-2023 she was the PI for the DFG-funded research project "Innovating Food, innovating Europe?", which she paused in 2021-2022 for the co-led research project with Prof. Kelly Bronson "Diversity by Design: emergent agricultural technologies for small-scale farming" based at the University of Ottawa.
She is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of STS (TUM), and an Affiliate Researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU), where she is currently preparing her Habilitation entitled "Humans - Food - Environments: Contributions to the Environmental Humanities from Science and Technology Studies and Sociocultural Anthropology."
Mascha holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of British Columbia (2016), and was a predoctoral Fellow of the Science, Technology & Society Program at Harvard University (2014-2015), a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU; summer 2019), as well as at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University (2019-2020), and a Postdoctoral Researcher on "AI and Environment" at the University of Ottawa (2021-2022).
Besides teaching and research, Mascha is the media and book review editor for the journal Science as Culture. She is also an active member and co-administrator for the Science & Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network, STSFAN, an international network of scholars working on technoscientific issues in food and agriculture.
Contact
Department Biology II
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Großhaderner Straße 2
82152 Planegg-Martinsried
and
Naturkundemuseum Bayern - BIOTOPIA Lab
Botanisches Institut
Menzinger Str. 67
80638 München, Germany
Room:
B.02.003
Email:
m.gugganig@lmu.de
Website:
https://www.mgugganig.net/
Work group
Life Sciences in Society
Selected Publications
Gugganig, M. 2024. Fieldnotes on Agricultural Policy: In Search of the Farmer. In Wolf-Meyer, M & D. Elliott (eds.), Fieldnotes, Raw and Unedited: A Compendium. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gugganig, M., Burch, K., Guthman, J, and K. Bronson. 2023. Contested Agri-food futures: introduction to the special issue. Agriculture and Human Values 40: 787-798. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10493-9
Burch, K., Gugganig, M., Guthman, J. et al. 2023. Cultivating intellectual community in academia: reflections from the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). Agriculture and Human Values 40: 951-959. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10439-1
Burch, K., Guthman, J., Gugganig, M. et al. 2023. Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond: an STSFAN manifesto. Agriculture and Human Values 40: 939-949. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10438-2
Gugganig, M. and K. Bronson. 2022. Digital Agriculture, and the Promise of Immateriality. In D. Szanto, A. Di Battista, and I. Knezevic (eds.), Food Studies: Matter, Meaning & Movement. Rebus Press, pp. 648-664.
Schneider, M., and M. Gugganig. 2021. Saving Bavarian hops in a ‘parallel universe’: lessons on the biopolitics of agricultural labour in Germany during the Corona pandemic. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 43(2): 85-95 https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12279
Gugganig, M. and R. Douglas-Jones. 2021. Visual Vignettes. In N. Klimburg-Witjes, N. Pöchhacker, and G.C. Bowker (eds.), Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Security Infrastructures. Manchester: Mattering Press, pp. 215-236.
Waller, L., and M. Gugganig. 2021. Re-visioning public engagement with emerging technology: A digital methods experiment on ʻvertical farming.’ Public Understanding of Science 30(5):588-04 https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662521990977
Gugganig, M., and N. Klimburg-Witjes. 2021. Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section. Science as Culture 30(3): 321-341 https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1939294
Gugganig, M. 2021. Hawai‘i as a Laboratory Paradise: Divergent Sociotechnical Island Imaginaries. Science as Culture 30(3): 342-366 https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1884217
Gugganig, M. 2020b. Traveling Postcards: A Research Exhibition. American Anthropologist Multimodal Anthropology online section http://www.americananthropologist.org/postcards/gugganig/
Gugganig, M., and S. Schor. 2020a. Teaching (with) Postcards: approaches in the classroom, the field, and the community. Teaching Anthropology 2(9): 56-65 https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v9i2.560
Gugganig, M., and S. Schor. 2020b. Multimodal Ethnography in/of/as Postcards. American Anthropologist 122(3): 691-697 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13435
Schor, S. and M. Gugganig. 2020. Special Section on Multimodal Postcards. American Anthropologist Multimodal Anthropology online section (curator of special section) http://www.americananthropologist.org/postcards/schor-gugganig/
Gugganig, M. 2017. The Ethics of Patenting and Genetically Engineering the Relative Hāloa. Special Issue ‘Nature and Ethics,’ Ethnos 82(1): 44-67 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1028564
Press Coverage
University of Ottawa. 2021. Technological equity for small-scale farms. Gazette. November 18. https://www.uottawa.ca/gazette/en/news/technological-equity-small-scale-farms
Gugganig, M., and K. Werth. 2020. Vertical Farming is a child of the high-tech Silicon Valley world (German and English). Faszination Forschung TUM (24):88-92.