24.3.16 | Prof. Dr. Anna-Katharina Hornidge is the new head of the Department of Social Sciences at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT). She is taking over from Prof. Dr. Achim Schlüter whose regular time in office comes to an end after five years. Prof. Schlüter wants to dedicate more time to his research and his working group “Institutional and Behavioural Economics”.

The sociologist Anna-Katharina Hornidge is already the head of the working group "Development and Knowledge Sociology" at the ZMT. She started her work as professor in cooperation with the University of Bremen in May last year.

“I especially look forward to continue to shape the social-scientific differentiation within the department and to thus further strengthen the interdisciplinary profile of the institute, “ says Prof. Hornidge about her new position. “Our department’s wide and mutually complementary disciplinary expertise and the close cooperation between the three working groups and the Leibniz Chair are an ideal prerequisite for this undertaking.”

Anna-Katharina Hornidge studied Southeast Asian Studies at the Universities of Bonn and Singapore. The topic of her dissertation in sociology at the TU Berlin and the National University of Singapore was "Knowledge Society – Vision and Social Construction of Reality in Germany and Singapore". Since October 2006 Prof. Hornidge led interdisciplinary research groups on Southeast and Central Asia at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn. In mid-2014 she qualified as professor with a post-doctoral thesis (habilitation) entitled “Discourses of Knowledge. Normative, Factual, Hegemonic”. In August 2014 she took on the position of director and professor of the Social Science Department of the Center for Development Research before she accepted the appointment in Bremen.

In her research she focuses on the human component in an aimed for sustainable co-existence of people and the resources of our planet. As main proposer of an EU Cost Action on ‚Ocean Governance‘ for example, she looks as current socio-technical questions of marine resource management (http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA15217). Furthermore, in a project on the living with sea level rise, she studies the translation processes of globally communicated ‚solutions‘ into the local contexts of Jakarta, Singapore and Manila.