From 2026 onwards, the Department of Human Geography at Goethe University Frankfurt will establish a new research agenda addressing the fundamental challenges of the post-global era.
Geography's approach to the multiple relations between space, humans, societies, and the environment (“more-than-humans") has always been in flux. Yet the increasing awareness of living in the Anthropocene, natural science's warnings that we have approached “planetary boundaries" for a “safe operating space for humanity", and the decolonial call for a more serious centring of alterity have given old questions an entirely new urgency. Whereas some see them primarily as political challenges to be addressed along familiar lines of socio-ecological, post-growth, and postcolonial projects, others call for epistemological and ontological de-centring and re-positioning as necessary preconditions for new kinds of politics, economics, and human-nature relations.
Aligned with the establishment of a department structure, Human Geography at Goethe Uni-versity has decided to pursue these questions in a new, cross-cutting research agenda. Geographies of Planetary Transformations builds on Frankfurt's long-standing profile “Geographies of Globalization", yet goes beyond it. It aims to:
- Create a vibrant and genuinely interdisciplinary geographical research environment in Frankfurt's new Department of Human Geography, based on shared debates about the planetary turn.
- Critically, productively, and creatively question the core assumptions and methodologies of geography's sub-disciplines, such as economic geography, urban studies, digital geographies, or environmental geographies, by taking the onto-epistemological challenges of the planetary turn seriously.
- Engage with the established thematic foci of these sub-disciplines and contribute empirical research from the new perspective of planetary thinking.
The term “transformation" in this context can be understood in loose analogy to Polanyi's “Great Transformation" and the resulting “double movement". In this sense, the planetary turn is by no means merely an academic endeavour, but also a critical reaction to the anthropocentrism, capitalocentrism, and eurocentrism of the Global Age with all the multiple crises it has brought about. As such, Geographies of Planetary Transformations are inevitably a political project. They acknowledge the complicity of academia in shaping future-oriented strategies and practices, as well as its responsibility to counter the contemporary dystopian tendencies in ecology, economy, and politics.
Within the new department structure, Geographies of Planetary Transformations will be established as a cross-cutting research agenda rooted in the five existing working groups on human-nature relations, urbanisation, economisation, digitalisation, and didactics. These research groups consist of independent researchers, including postdocs/assistant professors, who feel they can contribute to one or more of these fields and who receive their own basic endowment by the department.
The full calls for applications can be found here after 7th of May:
https://berufungsportal.uni-frankfurt.de/
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794896/FB11___Geowissenschaften___Geographie
