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Karin Parienti-Maire

Karin Parienti-Maire









Scholar of the IRTG from September 2019 to December 2019

Associated Member of the IRTG since 15.10.2017


Dissertation project

This PhD Project in Sociology aimed to study the urban gardening movement in France and Germany. “Urban gardening” designates gardening communities, that originated in North and South America and were developed with the purpose of growing vegetables and, at the same time, fostering good neighbourly relations in urban spaces.

The work focused on the question of the politicisation/depoliticisation (retreat into the private sphere) of the urban gardening phenomena and also aims at making emancipatory processes visible and thereby investigating small forms of ‘subjectivation’ (Rancière).

As otium is also expressed in a micrological order and, at the same time, allows “junctions, detours and shifts” (Pascal Nicolas-Lestrat) in a structure, I drew some attention to the idle moments of the “urban gardening” movement in my work. In doing so, I investigated the complex interactions inside the garden communities, while also paying attention to the relationships with the non-human actors (Latour).


Karin Parienti-Maire  was an associate Phd candidate in the Collaborative Research Center 1015 “Otium. Boundaries, Chronotopes, Practices” since October 2017 and is engaged with the “urban gardening” movement. She is doing her doctoral studies in Sociology (with Prof. Dr. Bröckling as her immediate supervisor). Her research centres around the question of the political impetus and its expressions in the urban gardening movement. She focuses in particular on the manifestations of ‘unspectacular doing’ (Daniel Überall), which she aspires to examine with ethnographical methods and conversation analysis.