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Katharina Maria Wuropulos is a sociologist working for the Prepare project at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies since February 2024.

For her latest research, she worked on better understandings of solidarity and security in Europe from a postcolonial perspective. This included ethnographic field work on flight migration in Europe’s humanitarian borderlands.

For her PhD, she researched everyday life with violence and media discrimination in Sweden and its material-social solutionisms. For about ten years she has built transnational organisations and communities and won a variety of grants at the intersection of academia and the social innovation ecosystem. Before coming to ���ϳԹ���Դ, she was a researcher at Bundeswehr University Hamburg, Bundeswehr University München and Augsburg University. For the duration of her PhD, Katharina was a fellow at the Research School on Peace and Conflict at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

She has studied at Uppsala University, Heidelberg University, and Bologna University. Previously, Katharina held a variety of positions and fellowships at GIZ in Brussels, at the German French research institute Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, at the Heidelberg Conflict Barometer, the German parliament, the German Foreign Office, and at different innovation laboratories on the SDGs (amongst others Unleash innovation lab and Stanford University’s peace innovation lab). Katharina is currently a fellow of the Schmidt Foundation’s International Strategy Forum.

Publications (Selection)

2018. Tagungsbericht des Arbeitskreises Gewalt als Problem der soziologischen Theorie, Workshop “Theorizing Violence” am 9. und 10. März 2018 an der Leibniz-Universität Hannover (mit Y. Porsché). In: Zeitschrift Soziologie. Forum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie. Vol. 47 (3), 2018: 349-351. 

2012-2015. A variety of conflict analyses in the Conflict Barometers 2012-2015. Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research.

Forthcoming Publications

2024. Journal Article, currently under peer-review. When different doings of times collide: temporalities of precarity in war and non-war everyday lives.

2024. Journal Article, currently under peer-review. Appeasing the locals when refugees arrive. Postcolonial perspectives on humanitarian assistance after the outbreak of war.

2024. Monograph. Imaginaries of Problematic Places: Violence and everyday life in Malmö, Sweden (contract signing pending).

Academic Talks and Presentations (Selection)

2024. Invited Talk @ Conference at Oslo Met University, Norway. En sosialantropologisk rapport fra Malmø – med fokus på ungdom om deres syn på fremtid og håp. Katharina Wuropulos forteller om sitt møte med unge flerkulturelle i Malmø.

2023. Frankfurt University, Germany. Presentation "Ethics & Analysing problems of the social: path dependencies of problematising social heterogeneity" at conference on history of sociology.

2023. EISA Pec Conference at Potsdam University, Germany, presentation on “Taking Care of Security. Investigating securitized issue-assemblages outside the security field”.

2023. Institute for Advanced Studies Amsterdam, Netherlands. Conference on Permacrisis infrastructures, presentation on “Securitized NGO-work against refugees: When NGOs adopt securitizing state practices”.

2023. Roskilde University, Denmark. Presentation “Stranger Imaginaries: Encountering imagined “others” in refugees” at Whiteness and Racialization in/between East and West Workshop.

2021. TIK, University of Oslo, Norway. “World making in Ethnography. Staying with the trouble of field work.”

2019. Tübingen University, Germany. Presentation at Summer School “Problematizing Morality”, Discussion of observations and analyses of field work in Malmö, Sweden.

2019. Invited talk @ PRIO, Norway. Panel discussion on “Cyberspace and Security” with Dr. André Barrinha. Contribution to “A STS perspective on the digital space in the working group Digital Bodies”.

2019. Wuppertal University, Germany. Presentation “Violence affected life worlds of youths”, Presentation from field research in Malmö at a session of the working group “Methodological problems of social science research on violence”.

2018. Hannover University, Germany. Presentation of ethical and methodological questions for field research with youths in urban spaces at a session of the working group “Methodological problems of social science research on violence”.

2018. Invited Talk @ Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway. Presentation and discussion on “Social Vulnerabiliy and No-go zone Imaginaries” at Centre for Peace.

2016. Invited Talk @ Bonn, Germany, Ministry of Family, Seniors, Women, and Youths. Talk on “Situation of political education of youths in Greece”.

Organisation of Academic Events (Selection)

2020. Teaching visit of Deka Anwar, Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), Jakarta, Indonesia, “Deradicalization in practice” in a BA Seminar at Universität der Bundeswehr München.

2018. Lecture and Discussion with ICAN Germany, Peace Nobel Prize Winner, at Universität der Bundeswehr München.

Current project: 

Against the backdrop of fragmented political debate, algorithm-controlled social media and threats of propaganda and disinformation, aims to better understand people's connection to the public.

Katharina will be conducting her postdoctoral research on public connection within the Prepare project. Her work will be one of three sub-studies in the project.

Priniciple investigator:

Affiliated researchers: , 

Previous projects: 

From 2021-2023, Katharina worked on the three year research project “Solidarity through Security? Discourses, Interactions and Practices of European Solidarity in the Field of Security” (ZUSE for short) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. ZUSE was a joint research project of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH), the University of Tübingen, and Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg. 

The wider context of ZUSE () examined how European institutions and states are increasingly emphasising the EU’s role as a security provider in uncertain times, with the aim of promoting solidarity within and among European societies. ZUSE investigates the political framing, administrative implementation, and societal effects of security as a potential novel guiding narrative of European integration.

The objective of this interdisciplinary research project was a more nuanced and differentiated understanding of security as a guiding concept of European solidarity and cohesion. ZUSE thus also contributed to the search for more diversity-centred conceptions of security that avoid exclusionary effects and the promotion of discourses of fear.

The research based at HSU, conducted by Teresa Koloma Beck, Katharina Wuropulos, and Alexia Hack, focussed on the relevance of security-related imaginaries of Europe in everyday contexts. We asked: in which social processes are imaginaries of »(in-)security« and togetherness produced? How do they articulate in everyday experiences? How do they change?

To answer these questions we looked at an empirical field that is particularly marked by conflicts between ideals of European solidarity and togetherness on the one hand, and European security interests on the other: places of first arrival for refugees.

https://www.hsu-hh.de/soziologie/en/zuse_en