I am a social scientist working on data, digital infrastructures, and the public life of science and technology. Across my research, I ask how data becomes evidence and public knowledge, how infrastructures organize relations among experts, institutions, and affected communities, and how collaborative forms of inquiry can be built around complex and contested problems.
Much of my work has focused on environmental science and environmental justice, but these questions also lead me into broader areas of digital culture, research infrastructure, expertise, participation, and public life. I am particularly interested in projects that bring ethnographic research into dialogue with scientific practice, technical systems, and collaborative forms of knowledge production.
I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Climate IT at the IT University of Copenhagen. My current research examines how PFAS (“forever chemicals”) in Denmark are sampled, measured, interpreted, communicated, and governed. Through ethnographic research, I study how scientific evidence moves among researchers, regulators, laboratories, and affected communities, and how people make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. One focus is how changing climatic conditions—including flooding and extreme heat—reshape PFAS exposure, mobility, and governance.
I also collaborate with scientists at the Danish PFAS Research and Delivery Center, connecting ethnographic research with ongoing scientific work on PFAS contamination, exposure, and mitigation.
A related strand of my work focuses on research infrastructures and public-facing forms of inquiry. I am interested in how archives, databases, digital platforms, and other technical systems shape what can be known, shared, and acted upon, and in how such infrastructures can support collaboration across academic, institutional, and public settings.
I received my PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. My dissertation, Archival Designs and the Informating of Environmentalism, examined the role of environmental data and digital archives in responses to expanding plastics and petrochemical production in the United States, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Since 2020, I have co-developed the Formosa Plastics Global Archive, a collaborative digital research platform supporting a transnational network of researchers and advocates studying the Formosa Plastics Group. This work has shaped my broader interest in how digital infrastructures can support sustained research collaboration and make environmental knowledge more accessible, connected, and reusable.
I grew up in Germany and studied Media, Communication, and Cultural Research in Bremen and Istanbul before completing an MA in Science and Technology Studies in Frankfurt. I have also lived in Iceland and carried out two years of ethnographic field research in Taiwan.
My work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), the Social Science Research Council, and the Environmental Data Justice Fund. I am a member of the Design Group for the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) and previously served as Open Data Editor for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.
I am interested in collaborations that bring questions of data, infrastructure, and the public life of science and technology into new empirical settings and interdisciplinary contexts.
You can reach me at timsch@itu.dk.
