Martin Thalhammer is a PhD student at CEU's department of Environmental Sciences and Policy. In his disseration project he is looking through the lens of a Multi-Species political ecology perspective at human-bark beetle relations throughout Upper Austria. This implies moving beyond the portrayal of bark beetle outbreaks as apolitical natural disasters towards understanding human-bark beetle relations as contested, socially mediated and socially co-produced, that is shaped by and embedded in local and supralocal historical legacies, socio-ecological processes, politico-economic developments and concurring human and non-human practices.
Martin Thalhammer holds a Bachelor and a Master Degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Vienna, a Bachelor Degree in Environmental Management from the University of Life Sciences (Vienna) and a Master Degree in Human and Social Ecology from the University of Klagenfurt. In his two master theses, he was dealing with the social and political ecology of a flood project in the Upper Austrian Eferding danube basin. He has worked at the University of Vienna as a teaching assistant, tutor and as an external lecturer. Thalhammer's research interests include political ecology, Multi-Species ethnography, economic anthropology and critical political economy.
Beyond, he is one of the founding members of the Climate Walk project - a combined research, education and media-art project in which several young academics and activists hike from the Norwegian North Cape to Southwestern Portugal to collect and understand people's experiences with Climate Change.