Luisa Jürgens has been a PhD researcher at the Institute of Sociology in Jena since January 2025, pursuing her dissertation within sub-project C04: “Who Owns the Foundation? Infrastructure Orders and the Renegotiation of the Public Sphere”. In her dissertation project, titled “Infrastructural Entanglements in/against Crisis. Ownership in Britain's (Post-)Public Provision”, she explores how property relations shape the way essential services are interconnected across sectors, and how these interconnections are implicated in and reconfigured against multiple contemporary crises. Her empirical work is based in Liverpool.
She studied Philosophy (BA) and Cultural Studies (BA) at the University of Leipzig, and Social Theory (MA) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the University of Vienna. In her master’s thesis, which she completed in June 2024, she examined the implementation of Community Wealth Building – a local economic development approach aiming to democratise local economies through co-operative and municipal ownership – focussing on the tension between its transformative ambitions and the constraints of austerity urbanism.
Her research interests include alternative forms of ownership and economic organisation, infrastructure policy, and the transformation of welfare states in the context of contemporary crises. Theoretically and methodologically, she draws on cultural political economy, social reproduction theory and situational analysis.
