Dr. Katja Thiele, a member of the Economic Geography Research Group until 2022, was awarded the Peter Meusburger Doctoral Prize for her dissertation titled “Public Libraries Between Digitization and Austerity: Municipal Strategies and Their Implications for Educational Equity.”

On October 25, 2022, Claudia Kölsche successfully defended her dissertation titled “Why Regions? Regionalization as a Project-Based Organizational Process—Reconstructed Using Systems Theory with the Example of the Energy Transition.”

The Economic Geography Working Group warmly welcomes Dr. Frankline Ndi to GIUB. Frankline will be conducting research as a postdoctoral fellow at the CRC Future Rural Africa. He is an environmental social scientist with training in human geography, rural sociology, and political ecology. His academic profile reflects nearly 10 years of work in the interrelated fields of gender, agriculture, the environment, and development.

On December 1 and 2, 2021, Dr. Amy Horton from University College London joined the GIUB via video conference. On Wednesday, she delivered this year’s International Lecture in Economic Geography, titled “Financing Care: Feminist Economic Geographies of Social Infrastructure”; on Thursday, she was a guest speaker in Britta Klagge’s master’s-level advanced seminar on the topic of infrastructures.

On November 9, 2021, Katja Thiele successfully defended her dissertation titled “Public Libraries Caught Between Digitalization and Austerity: Municipal Strategies and Their Implications for Educational Equity at the Local Level.” The defense took place in a hybrid format, meaning it was held both in person at the Department of Geography and via Zoom. This allowed family and friends who were unable to be in Bonn due to the COVID-19 pandemic to participate as well.

Marie Volkert received the DVAG Prize for Applied Geography, worth 1,000 €, for her master’s thesis on “Electrification and Devolution in Kenya: Opportunities and Challenges,” which was supervised by Prof. Britta Klagge and Prof. Peter Dannenberg (University of Cologne). The prize is awarded every two years and recognizes outstanding university theses in the field of applied geography. The master’s thesis was written as part of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center “Future Rural Africa” (CRC228) within the “Energy Futures” project, which is led by Britta Klagge and Clemens Greiner and which funded Marie Volkert’s research stay in Kenya.