Tim Schütz COLLABORATION BIO

I am a second-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I studied Communication, Media and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bremen, Germany and Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. I also hold a prospective MA in Science and Technology Studies from Goethe University Frankfurt.

Broadly, my research examines the digital data and infrastructure that communities need to effectively address entangled economic, environmental and public health challenges. Most recently, I am interested in activist response to environmental disaster caused by the Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics. I  use the Disaster STS Network to build an archive of material documenting Formosa in the US and Taiwan.

My interest in civic data and "archiving for the Anthropocene" also cuts through series of collaborative research, infrastructure and pedagogy projects that I am involved in, including Quotidian Anthropocenes, Visualizing Toxic Places and the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 Project. As a design team member for Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), I think about project architecture and write a monthly PECE community newsletter.

With Kim Fortun and Kaitlyn Rabach, I teach the online undergraduate course Environmental Injustice. I particularly focus on teaching the use and critical analysis of civic data resources. Together with students I developed and run an Instagram account connecting the course to community organizations. We also continue to create civic data resources, like this map of high-risk facilities in Los Angeles County.

I occasionally do audiovisual work, like this short documentary film about free software hackers in Turkey and the science communication series titled Tactics for Quotidian Anthropocenes.