Dr. Larissa Fleischmann is a human geographer whose work is situated in the fields of political geography, environmental geography, and migration and border studies. Her current research focuses on the politics and power structures shaping human–environment relations in the context of planetary transformations. Through this work, she seeks to contribute to the development of more-than-human political geographies. In particular, she pursues three main areas of research:

First, she examines the unruly mobilities of nonhumans, such as animals and pathogens, as well as governmental efforts to contain, control, and restrict them through territorial bordering practices. She is particularly interested in the material manifestations of borders, such as veterinary fences, but also in other empirical contexts in which borders are produced, negotiated, or disrupted through multispecies encounters.

Second, she investigates how abject lives or waste animals are produced through biopolitical and thanatopolitical regimes of governance. Her work examines how violent technologies of power cut across species divides and differentiate between lives to be protected and those rendered threatening, exploitable, or disposable. Empirically, she explores these processes through the governance of infectious animal diseases and the production of biosecurity, as well as through broader forms of nonhuman exploitation in the Capitalocene.

Third, she explores less-studied aspects of low-carbon energy transitions. She examines how water, subterranean spaces, and more-than-human relations co-produce, complicate, or disrupt renewable-energy projects. In this context, she is currently developing a new project on geothermal energy production using water from former underground copper mining soughs. She is also interested in how energy transitions are practiced “from below”, as civil society actors negotiate, implement, and contest transition processes and develop alternative visions of regional futures. This includes investigating how energy transitions unfold within increasingly diverse societies shaped by migration and how transition projects become sites of conflict and right-wing extremist mobilisation.

In her habilitation project, Animals, Power and Space: More-than-Human Political Geographies of Animal Health, Larissa examines how the governance of infectious animal diseases materialises in practices of bordering and territorialisation, while approaching animals and viruses as co-constitutive of these processes. The project is funded by a research grant awarded through the German Research Foundation (DFG). Drawing on research on African swine fever in Germany and foot-and-mouth disease in Namibia, she explores three practices—fencing, zoning, and culling—and examines how biosecurity regimes unfold through (post)colonial forms of veterinary governance that are continually contested by humans and nonhumans alike. She is currently co-editing the open-access volume Critical Animal Health Studies with Dr Wisse van Engelen, forthcoming in Routledge’s Multispecies Encounters series.

Dr. Larissa Fleischmann currently leads the junior research group Diversity in Socio-Ecological Transformations at the Just Transition Center. Together with her team, she conducts transdisciplinary research on how migration, civil society, and human–environment relations shape transformations in the Central German mining region.

She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Konstanz in February 2019. During her doctoral studies (2014-2018), she worked as a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence Cultural Foundations of Social Integration. Her dissertation is published open access with transcript entitled Contested Solidarity: Practices of Refugee Support between Humanitarian Help and Political Activism. In her book, she examines refugee-support initiatives in Germany following the summer of migration in 2015. The dissertation received the Award for Outstanding Dissertations from the Section on Migration and Ethnic Minorities of the German Sociological Association.