About me:

Since April 2021, I am working as a lecturer and research assistant in the cultural geography research group of the Department of Geography at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Prior, I studied geography in the Bachelor and Master of Science at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. In my Bachelor’s thesis, I looked at the geographical representations of the indigenous environmental movement of Standing Rock. After a semester abroad in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I completed my Master’s degree with a thesis on the care relationships between people and houseplants in the context of the ‘urban jungle’ trend. I work with a feminist posthumanist perspective and a multispecies ethnography approach and position myself within the more-than-human geography and environmental humanities communities. I hold that in the current epoch of multiple crisis not only an epistemological reorientation is urgently needed but also an ontological one.


Contact:

Institute of Geography 

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität 

Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg 21 

55099 Mainz 

E-Mail: olegzurmuehlen@uni-mainz.de


Research Interests:

More-than-human Geographies, Multispecies Studies, Human-Plant Geographies, Critical Plant Studies, More-than-human Commoning, Maritime Geographies


Research Projects:

Amphibious Venice

In my dissertation project, I (auto)-ethnographically explore practices and prospects of an amphibious thinking(-feeling) towards matters of life and death in an Anthropocene Venice at the crossroads between living together with the tide and an impending doomsday.


Publications:

Verne, J., J. Poerting, L. Krieg und O. Ködding-Zurmühlen (2021): Tiere als lebendige Werkzeuge. In: Bork-Hüffer, T., H. Füller und T. Straube (Hrsg.): Handbuch digitale Geographie. Welt – Wissen – Werkzeuge. Paderborn, 330-342.

Zurmühlen, O. (2020): Whose Space is this? A Multispecies Auto-Ethnography of Viral-Human Negotiations in the Contact Zone. In: Witnessing Corona – a joint blog series by Blog Medical Anthropology / Medizinethnologie and boasblogs.


Teaching:

Summer term 2021:

  • M8 Theorien und Methoden der Humangeographie: Home-Making und Identität

Winter term 2021/22:

  • M5/M2Ed Übung: Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten
  • M2/M2Ed Übung: Wirtschaftsgeographie

Summer term 2022:

  • M2/M2Ed Übung: Sozialgeographie
  • M1-MA: Project Seminar: Counter-cartographies of Extinction