Alexander Vorbrugg

Visiting Academic

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Biography

November 2024 to January 2025

Alexander Vorbrugg is a senior researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Bern. He earned his PhD in Geography from Goethe University Frankfurt and has held visiting research fellowships at the New School in New York and University College London (UCL), including the Department of Geography and the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Alexander is an associate editor for Geographica Helvetica and co-editor of the Critical Rural Studies book series (transcript). He is also the co-chair of the Geography section of the German Association for East European Studies (DGO), co-initiator of the research network “War Effects on Food Systems and Environment”, and co-coordinator of the working group “Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon” with the Global Land Programme.

His research focuses on three main domains:

  • Rural Change and Agricultural Land: Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Alexander has studied and theorized the complex forms and temporalities of rural change and dispossession in contemporary Russia. His monograph, Dispersed Dispossession: Collective Goods, Appropriation, and Agency in Rural Russia, is forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press.
  • Post-Disruption Land Use: Alexander is interested in how resources are made, reframed, and governed in the context of environmental crises and changes. In his ongoing project, Russia’s New Forests, he examines how trees growing on abandoned agricultural land are transformed into objects of knowledge, governance, and economic and environmental interest in fundamentally new ways. The Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione funds this project. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, part of this project has focused on studying land disruptions in Ukraine resulting from the war and exploring options for future land use.
  • Collaborative Methodologies: Alexander engages in projects on ethnographic collaborative research and the politics of fieldwork, visual forms of research and science communication, and interdisciplinary collaborations within his research fields.