2021-present
Lecturer and research fellow, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany

2018-2021
Lecturer and research fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway 

2016-2018 
Postdoctoral research fellow, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany

2015
Visiting Fellow, European Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland

2014-2015
Fellow, re:work (Research Center for Work and the Lifecycle in Global History), Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

2012-2014
Fellow in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, UK

2009- 2013
Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) Social Anthropology, St Antony’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, England / UK

• Environmental anthropology
• Anthropology of economy
• Value and values
• Activism and civic engagement
• Digital ethnography
• Comparative and global approaches in anthropology
• China and Global China

My current research focuses on environmental pollution, climate finance, and carbon accounting to understand their impacts on people’s daily lives, sociocultural values, and global visions of the future.

I explore how Chinese and transnational experts in government, state-owned corporations, and financial trading seek to quantify and monetize environmental behavior through the metric of carbon dioxide emissions. I connect the intersection of financial debt and green credit in regional carbon markets for industrial polluters that funded carbon offset projects, including fieldwork in a Chinese state-owned forestry farm. I also examine the role of digitisation for streamlining governance in the fields of resource management and environmental protection, particularly through CO2 footprint apps. These apps offset the carbon footprint of consumers by financing reforestation projects of climate refugees in a desert area, and reward users with green credits.

I argue that the utopian impulse of China’s transformation not only speaks to the state’s political hopes for redemption from industrial pollution, but also resonates with aspirations of citizens seeking to escape the unsettling effects of ecological degradation through the creation of an “ecological civilization” in China and beyond.

Funding:

Researcher-In-Residence in the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (2021 - awarded and declined), Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Deutsches Museum

https://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/news/news_events/2020-news/jan-21-fellows/index.html

Frontlines of Value Research Group: Toppforsk grant from the Bergen Foundation and the Elite Professorship Program at the University of Bergen (2018-2021)

https://www.uib.no/en/frontlines/124753/charlotte-bruckermann

Financialization Research Group: Max-Plank-Institut für ethnologische Forschung (2016-2018)

https://www.eth.mpg.de/4207784/project

This project explores the role that contemporary art, inspired by ethnographic methodologies and an anthropological framework, can have in the study of contemporary societies and cultures and in fostering civil participation. Our joint research (Massmiliano Mollona, Susanne Brandtstädter, Charlotte Bruckermann) focuses on the possibility of a Museum of the Commons – a place where economic practices become configured and reconfigured in art, and where social experiments in art take ethnographic methodologies as a starting point for social engagement and for the commoning of skills, knowledge, property, and ecological resources,

https://auerbach-institut.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/fellows-und-hosts/alle-fellows-und-hosts/massimiliano-mollona-susanne-brandtstaedter-charlotte-bruckermann

Funding: Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies (2023)

The EASA Anthropology of Economy network held virtual events in 2021 to showcase, network, and to share experiences, themes, and knowledge in and about economic anthropology. The global meeting for economic anthropology was an attempt to make visible the breadth and depth of research in the sub-discipline today. The meetings were an exploration. Those asked to speak provided lead-ins into regional knowledges and contemporary themes, intended to spark conversation amongst the audience in a spirit of exploring, engaging, and sharing.

Co-organizers: Juliane Müller, Andreas Streinzer, Michelle Fontefrancesco, Ognjen Kojanić

Funding: European Association of Social Anthropology and University of St Gallen (2021)

https://easaonline.org/networks/economy/events

https://www.easaonline.org/networks/economy/institutions

https://easaonline.org/downloads/networks/economy/AOE_GMEA_flyer.pdf

Fieldwork for my doctoral project (University of Oxford, 2012) involved living for sixteen months with a family in a mountain village in China’s “Coal Province”, Shanxi, on the north-central Loess Plateau. The resulting monograph Claiming Homes: confronting domicide in rural China (Oxford: Berghahn, 2019) examined how villagers made themselves at home through work and care, despite labor devaluation, ecological degradation, and spatial relocation in the region. This occurred largely due to a formerly state-owned energy corporation diversifying its investment portfolio to include tourism in the village. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstood devaluation and confronted dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty took root in China, this process challenged the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class.

Funding: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK) +3 Studentship (2008-2011)

London School of Economics (LSE, UK) Fellowship (2012-2014)

Re:work - Käte Hamburger Kolleg des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) and Humboldt Universität (2014-2015)

Global Aging - Europainstitut, Universität Basel (2015)

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BruckermannClaiming