Friederike Pank

Friederike is a writer, musician, and anthropologist. After her MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, she carried out field research on the changing spatiotemporal configurations of Eastern Germany’s coal mining landscapes within the framework of the EMPTINESS project.

In this research, Friederike investigated how civic, political, and corporate actors negotiate local futures after the decline of coal. In particular, she looked at how ambitious hopes for the region’s revitalisation are reconciled with the local conditions of disintegrating services and infrastructures, persistent depopulation, and popular resentment which characterised the decades of post-industrial shrinkage after the collapse of socialism in 1989. Her research was generously supported by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of UKRI.