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Franziska Strack is a political theorist with research interests in political ecology, environmental humanities, feminism and decolonialism, art and media, and time. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. Her work treats politics as an ecological experience and generates concepts for the involvement of sensing human bodies and more-than-human environments in political practices.
Franziska’s dissertation uses sonic-musical figures (such as voice, song, rhythm, or silence) to provide a differentiated vocabulary for the ecological, affective, and corporeal elements of politics. Specifically, it examines how linguistic, musical, and infra/ultrasonic sounds shape the experience and theoretical configuration of political communication and community-building and include nonhuman and environmental forces in communicative exchanges.
At the Rachel Carson Center, Franziska draws upon her explorations of sound and political ecology to describe how climate change calls for new notions of communal action and living-together. By conceptualizing the affective and material “atmospheres” of political engagement, she calls attention to the ecological dimensions of normative principles and political activism, negating anthropocentrism yet not the importance of human influence and responsibility.
RCC Research Project: Sound, Ecology, and Politics
Selected Publications:
- “From Sound to Music: Listening to the Political with Gilles Deleuze.” Contemporary Political Theory (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00540-7.
- “Sounds Like America: The Ecopolitics of Walt Whitman and John Luther Adams.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 70, no. 1 (2022): 23–37.
- “Bodies Under Water: Jean Painlevé and the Adventures of Interspecies Communication.” Environmental Humanities 13, no. 1 (2021): 181–200.