Institute Human Geography
Human geography is a critical field of inquiry that explores how spatial relations shape—and are shaped by—human life, social and economic inequalities, power structures, and technological and environmental inequities.
Critical human geography interrogates the socio-spatial processes that produce uneven geographies across time and space, from urbanization, economic systems and practices, socio-cultural inclusions and exclusions to digital transformations. It draws on interdisciplinariy and a broad variety of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methodological approaches. At Heidelberg University, three research groups focus on urban geography, digital and cultural geography, as well as social and economic geography. Researchers emphasize close collaboration with their research subjects, often through participatory or co-productive methods. Most researchers are engaged in fundamental and transdisciplinary research, working alongside stakeholders, policymakers, and the public in co-production processes aimed at initiating transformative actions toward sustainable and inclusive pathways, while also informing policy.
Associated Research Groups
Rosa Lehmann
Rosa Lehmann is a political ecologist, human geographer, and interdisciplinary researcher on socioenvironmental change and sustainable transformations. She holds a PhD in Political Science, a Master's in Anthropology and Political Science from Freiburg University, Germany and is a Junior Professor of “Innovation and Sustainability in Ibero-America” at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies in conjunction with the Department of Geography of Heidelberg's Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Sciences and the Heidelberg Center for the Environment. Her research is situated in human geography, political ecology and interdisciplinary sustainability and energy studies, and focuses on changing sociospatial relations in times of triple planetary crises, new energy spaces and renewable frontiers, multiscalar conflicts around energy transitions and struggles around just socioecological transformations in urban and rural contexts with a regional focus on Chile, Mexico, and Germany.
Yaatsil Guevara González
Yaatsil Guevara González is an anthropologist and an ethnographer. She holds a PhD in Sociology, and a Master’s in Regional Studies. She is a Junior Professor of “Migration and the Americas” at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies in conjunction with the Department of Geography of Heidelberg’s of Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Sciences and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. Previously, she worked at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies (Mainz), the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, and the Center for InterAmerican Studies (Bielefeld). She was also a fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies at the University of Costa Rica. Her research explores how migratory regimes impact and resonate in the everyday lives of undocumented migrants, as well as the spatial dimensions of irregularized migration. She also investigates the social processes occurring in the ‘in-between’ of irregularized cross-border mobility. The regional focus of her work is Central America, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S.