Prof. Dr. Ina Dietzsch

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
― Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs And Women The Reinvention Of Nature

Ina Dietzsch is full professor and executive director at the Institute for European Ethnology and Culture and History at University of Marburg (since 2020). Moreover she is scientific project manager in the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project "Visual Communication in Participatory Urban Development Processes" at the University of Basel and the School of Art and Design FHNW (since 2018), cielab.ch

Her work is focused on mathematization/digitization of and with “nature”, multimodal and collaborative ethnographies and historical perspectives on (everyday life) technologies. She has a particular interest in theoretical thinking about and with complexity. Her current research focusses on water issues, water narratives, water practices and water ontologies.

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  Digitally Counting Water as Cultural Technique

  SNF: Visual Communication in Participatory Urban Development Processes

  Website of the project CIELab Critical Icono-Ethnography Lab

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Curriculum vitae

  From 2018 to 2020, Ina Dietzsch was scientific coordinator of the SNSF project "Negotiating, converting and interconnecting life in digital agriculture" at the University of Basel, where she also completed her habilitation in 2015. After her PhD at Humboldt University of Berlin (2000), she held post-doc positions as research associate at the University of Basel (2013-2017), as scientific project manager of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)-Project "Informality, Trust and Mistrust in Societies in Transition" at Humboldt University of Berlin and as research associate at Durham University (2006-2009), she acted as a chair at the Seminar for Cultural Studies and European Ethnology at the University of Basel (2013/14 and 2017-2019) and the Institute of Sociology at Technical University of Dresden (2015/16).

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  This list compiles English publications. For further German publications please look at the German version of the website. 

  2026 
  Counting Water for an African future? Smart water billing in South Africa (together with Amber Abrams) In:  African Digital Cultures: Platforms, publics, infrastructures. In: Junck, Leah/Yeku, James Tunde (eds.) Taylor & Francis.
  Online Publication

  2022
  Ina Dietzsch interviewed by Carsten Wilhelm in the special issue "Culture.s of Technics, innovation and communication: imaginaries, potentialities, utopias" of Interfaces numériques Volume 11 - No. 1 | 2022  
  Link to Special Issue "Culture.s of Technics, innovation and communication: imaginaries, potentialities, utopias"

  2021 
  Waterworlds revisited, Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie, 13, 79-95. 
  Online Publication

  2017
  Calculating spaces: digital encounters with maps and geodata. (Gemeinsam mit Daniel Kunzelmann). In: Koch, Gertraud (Ed.): Digitization. Handbook of theories and concepts for empirical cultural research. Routledge, 209-229.
  Online Publication

  2015 
  Narrating with Numbers. Diagrams as Places of Counting and Narrating. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 111 (1), pp. 31–53.
  Online Publication

  2014
  Life worlds of deceleration. An addition to the ´new mobilities paradigm´. In: Burrell, Kathy/Hoerschelmann, Kathrin (eds.) (2014): Socialist and Post-socialist Mobilities. Palgrave Macmillan, 240-259.
  Online Publication

  2013
  Together with Philipp Ullmann: Beyond surface and depth. Explorations in mathematics and cultural analysis
  Englisch Version: Ina Dietzsch & Philipp Ullmann, Jenseits von Oberfläche und Tiefe. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde LXVII /116, 2013, Issue 1+2, pp. 221-237

  2009
  Perceptions of Decline: Crisis, Shrinking and Disappearance as Narrative Schemas to Describe Social and Cultural Change. In: Annual Yearbook, Inst. de Ist. „G. Bariţ” din Cluj-Napoca, Series Humanistica, tom. 1 VII, 2009, 147–176.
  Online Publication