Spotlight on: Lena Schlegel
We’re delighted to introduce Dr. des. Lena Schlegel as part of our PhD/ECR Spotlight Series. Lena is currently a postdoctoral researcher in more-than-human geographies at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. She completed her PhD in sociology at LMU Munich, where she explored environmental knowledge and care in southeast Australia following the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20. Lena also holds a BA in Political Science and Sociology and an MA in Peace Studies and International Relations from the University of Tübingen.
Find about more about Lena via her LinkedIn and researcher profile. Lena can also be found on Bluesky (@lenamschlegel.bsky.social) and her photography on Instagram (@lenam_sch).
Tell us a bit about yourself.
Hi! I am Lena. I just completed my PhD at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU, Munich. During a year-long fellowship at the University of Melbourne in 2022 and 2023, I conducted fieldwork in bushfire-affected communities in Victoria exploring how ‘care’ for animals and the environment was negotiated in the aftermath of Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires. The research contributes to better understanding the cultural aspects of sustainability transformations, and their obstacles. I have also worked in projects on global health, technological innovation, and environmental ethics. I am a nature lover and engage in wildlife rehabilitation and conservation projects, both in Australia and Germany, as well as community-supported-agriculture initiatives, and mountain sports.
What are your research interests?
I am interested in nature-society relations, in particular the social, cultural, political, ethical and affective dimensions of environmental loss and change. I work with feminist and posthumanist theories, in particular on multispecies care, environmental knowledge, nonhuman agency, materiality and affect. In addition to more traditional forms of qualitative inquiry such as interviews, I experiment with multispecies and multisensory ethnographies, diffractive reflexivity, and creative writing. I also employ photography as an ‘art of noticing’, exemplary in my contribution to the Sydney Environment Institute’s 7th issue.
What are three sources you’d recommend to others related to environment and climate politics?
I love the digital magazine EdgeEffects, produced by grad students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, both as an outlet for ECR research and as a resource for research on global environmental issues in a variety of formats, from texts, over visual essays to podcasts.
WeAnimals is not just an amazing repository for the human impacts on other animals’ lives across the globe, but indeed a hub for animal advocacy through photojournalism led by the amazing Jo-Anne McArthur, whom I had the honour of interviewing for my PhD in 2021.
Finally, I would like to point you to the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment and Society Portal, a fantastic compilation of open access resources on human-environment research, including various publication lines, virtual exhibitions and a multimedia library.
What’s next for you?
As of June 2025, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the new Society-Environment Research Group at the Chair for Cultural Geography at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg where I will work on more-than-human geographies in peri-urban spaces.
The ECP WG’s Spotlight Series provides a platform for PhD and early career researchers to introduce themselves and their work. If you are interested in participating, please get in touch at: ecp.group@bisa.ac.uk.
Photo by Paul Hudson via Flickr. Text has been added to the photo.