GSSC Seminar Series/MESH Green Shoots Seminar:
21 April 2026
Towards an Ethnography of Mediterranean Critical Zones | Sensing & Sense-Making of Socio-Environmental Injustice through Multidisciplinary Community-based Research and Interventions
Christoph Lange (University of Cologne, MESH)
12:00-13:00
In this seminar, I introduce the concept of Mediterranean Critical Zones (MCZ) as the underlying framework of my current postdoctoral research project. The project aims at developing a heuristic toolkit for integrating ethnography and environmental anthropology with environmental humanities, and Earth system approaches to socio-environmental change and interventions. Building on the notion of “nested Mediterranean zones”, the project reconceptualizes the Mediterranean not as a bounded region, but as a dynamic assemblage of overlapping ecological, political, and infrastructural formations. These zones are increasingly shaped by global environmental change, resource scarcity, and enduring colonial asymmetries, making the Mediterranean a key site for studying socio-environmental injustice.
Christoph Lange is the Academic Programme Manager of MESH. He studied Social Anthropology and Middle East Studies (Master’s degree, two majors) at the University of Leipzig from 2004–2011. With his first travels to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan he set his research focus on the Levant region within the Arab Middle East. From 2008–2012 he worked for the German state-funded Collaborative Research Center 586 Difference and Integration at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle/Lutherstadt Wittenberg where he conducted his first ethnographic research about Bedouin representations in Syrian television dramas and Arab media discourses about authenticity.
From 2014–2018, he was a research assistant of Martin Zillinger and doctoral researcher at the Research Lab Transformations of Life of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. Since 2018, he has been working at Martin Zillinger’s chair at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the UoC. In 2020, he successfully completed his doctoral thesis on Decolonizing the Arabian Horse – The Breeding, Circulation and Certification of the Straight Egyptian Arabian in the 21st Century which was awarded with the second place of the dissertation prize of German Anthropological Association (DGSKA/GAA) in 2021.
Currently, Christoph Lange is developing a postdoctoral project on socioecological crises and intersectional collapses in the Mediterranean by adopting a Critical Zones’ perspective. Furthermore, he is founding member of the Mediterranean Liminalities Research Lab at the UoC. In this capacity, together with Martin Zillinger, he co-leads the EUniWell Research Initiative Crisis and Conviviality in the Mediterranean (2024–2027).
Christoph Lange is also the speaker of the GAA Mediterranean Regional Group . In 2021, he was a contributing editor for the CASTAC Platypus Blog.
