Associate Professor of Anthropology PD Dr. Carsten Wergin
Contact Information
PD Dr. Carsten Wergin
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Room 400.02.04
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
+49 (0) 6221 54 4002
carsten.wergin@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de
About
Carsten Wergin is a social anthropologist working at the intersections of heritage, culture and ecology, with regional foci in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. He trained at Goldsmiths College and the University of Bremen, and after spending a few years at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) he joined Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg in 2014. For his PhD, he conducted fieldwork within the transcultural music scene of the French Overseas-Department La Réunion. His habilitation is based on a longterm ethnographic study of a conflict over the construction of a $45 billion AUS-Dollar Liquefied Natural Gas Facility (LNG) on sacred Indigenous land in Northwest Australia. Carsten Wergin has held honorary fellowships at UNSW and the Australian National University (ANU), and functions as the chairperson of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and as vice-president (membership) of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS).
Curriculum Vitae (Excerpt)
2019 – Associate Professor of Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg.
2014 – 2019 Junior Research Group Leader “The Transcultural Heritage of Northwest Australia”, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg.
2011 – 2014 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Social Policy Research Centre, The University of New South Wales, Sydney.
2008 – 2011 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Graduate School “Society and Culture in Motion”, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.
Selected Publications
Monographs
2023 Tourism, Indigeneity, and the Importance of Place: Fighting for Heritage at Australia’s Last Frontier (Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility and Society Series) Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
2018 Der Ruf des Schneckenhorns: Hermann Klaatsch (1863 – 1916): Ein Heidelberger Wissenschaftler in Nordwestaustralien. Heidelberg: heiBOOKS (with Corinna Erckenbrecht).
2010 Kréol Blouz: Musikalische Inszenierungen von Identität und Kultur (with CD). Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau.
Edited Volumes
2024 Digitising Heritage: Transoceanic Connections between Australia and Europe. Heidelberg: HeiUP (with Stefanie Affeldt).
2014 Materialities of Tourism. Tourist Studies 14(3) (Special Issue, with Stephen Muecke).
2013 Musical Performance and the Changing City: Post-Industrial Contexts in Europe and the United States. New York: Routledge (with Fabian Holt).
2012 Songlines vs. Pipelines? Mining and Tourism in Remote Australia. Australian Humanities Review 53 (Special Section, with Stephen Muecke).
2009 Re-Scaling the Anthropology of Tourism. Etnográfica 13 (2) (Special Section, with Patrick Neveling).
2009 Haut: Zwischen Innen und Außen – Organ. Fläche. Diskurs. Münster: LIT (Editorial Team “Villigster Werkstatt Interdisziplinarität”).
Journal Articles
2023 From Transculture to Transecology. Coming to Terms with Multispecies Conviviality in the Education for Sustainable Development. heiEDUCATION Journal 9 | 2023: 83–95. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.heied.2023.9.24724
2022 All Landscape is Collaborative: Re-Mobilizing Care and Concern on a Damaged Planet. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 35(3): 445-459. https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2022.2095991
2021 Listening “Care-Fully”: Acoustemologies of Hope in the Face of Human-Made Environmental Degradation. Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 10(2): 24-37. https://doi.org/10.4000/cadernosaa.3739 (with Edwin Mulligan)
2021 Healing through Heritage? The Repatriation of Human Remains from European Collections as Potential Sites of Reconciliation. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 30/1: 123-133. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300109
2018 Policy in the Anthropocene. Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 2018, 3: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.12893/gjcpi.2018.3.3
Contributions to Edited Volumes
2021 Understanding Multispecies Mobilities: From Mosquito Eradication to Coexistence, in: M. Hall and D. Tamir (eds.) Mosquitopia: The Place of Pests in a Healthy World. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 33-46. (with U. Beisel) https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003056034
2021 Responsibility = Ownership? An Ethnographic Moment in Native Title, in: Geoff Rodoreda und Eva Bischoff (eds.) Mabo's Cultural Legacy. History, Literature, Film and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia. London: Anthem Press, pp. 47-58.
2020 Von der Batarsité zum Welterbe: Die Maloya-Musik der Insel La Réunion, in: Christofer Jost und Gerd Sebald (eds.) Musik – Kultur – Gedächtnis: Theoretische und analytische Annäherungen an ein Forschungsfeld zwischen den Disziplinen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 278-297. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29609-4_13
2017 The ‘White Magic’ of Modernity: Retracing Indigenous Environmental Knowledge in Settler-Colonialist Australia. In: Eveline Dürr and Arno Pascht (eds.) Environmental Transformations and Cultural Responses: Ontologies, Discourses and Practices in Oceania. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 157-185.
2017 Tourismus, in: Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer (eds.) Global Pop: Das Buch zur Weltmusik. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, pp. 195-203. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05480-7_24
- Tourism, Indigeneity, and the Importance of Place
- Digitising Heritage
- Der Ruf des Schneckenhorns
- Musical Performance and the Changing City
- Kréol Blouz: Musikalische Inszenierungen von Identität und Kultur
- Songlines vs. Pipelines?
- From Transculture to Transecology
- All Landscape is Collaborative
- Listening “Care-Fully”
- Understanding Multispecies Mobilities
- Healing through Heritage?
- Policy in the Anthropocene
- Von der Batarsité zum Welterbe: Die Maloya-Musik der Insel La Réunion
- Tourismus und Musik
- HipHop à La Réunion
- Video Interview: How Does Tourism Change People and Place?
- Video Interview: How Can Australian Indigenous Experience Change Western Perspectives of the World?
- A video conversation with Michael A. Di Giovine about “Tourism, Indigeneity, and the Importance of Place“
Awards and Honours
2023 Inaugural AuSI / HRC Visiting Fellow, Australian National University (ANU).
2018 Senior Visiting Fellow, University of New South Wales (UNSW).
2011 Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Outgoing Fellow, 7th Framework Programme, European Commission.
2009 Dissertation Price, Mariann Steegmann Foundation.
2007 Young Scholars Award, European Science Foundation.
Memberships and other Functions
Chairperson of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt)
Vice-President (membership) of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS)
Further Memberships
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (GASCA)
Frobenius Institute for Cultural Anthropology, Frankfurt
Heidelberg Centre for the Environment (HCE)
Petrocultures Research Group (www.petrocultures.com)
Current Projects
Carsten Wergin is a Principal Investigator (PI) in Shaping Access, an interdisciplinary research project on the handling of human remains in collections of the Ethnographic Museum vPST and Heidelberg University (FITCH, Research Tandems). He is also a PI in the international research project Mobile Mosquitoes, which develops a transdisciplinary global health perspective on the entangled mobilities of Aedes mosquitoes and humans, with contributions from cultural anthropologists, human geographers and entomologists based in India, Mexico, Tanzania and Germany (Volkswagen Foundation, Grant Number 9B366).
