Tim Schütz is a social scientist specializing in the study of data practices, politics, and infrastructures.
On the Disaster-STS Network research platform, Tim is leading the Archiving Formosa Plastics project and involved in the Environmental Justice Global Record project. Previously, he worked on the Quotidian Anthropocenes project.
Currently (2024), Tim is a fifth-year PhD student in University of California, Irvine’s Department of Anthropology, where he is studying how data practices evolve, the underlying infrastructures and ideologies that shape them, and the contextual factors shaping the analytical and political power of data. His current research focuses on data-driven environmental justice advocacy and research about Formosa Plastics, one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies, with operations in Texas, Louisiana, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
In 2017, he received a bachelor’s of arts degree from the Department of Communication and Media Studies and Department of Anthropology at the University of Bremen. In 2020, he graduated from the master’s program in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Frankfurt. In 2020 and 2023, Tim was a visiting researcher at the International College of Innovation at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Tim grew up in Bielefeld, Germany, then moved to Reykjavík, Iceland for a European Volunteer Service. He later completed an Erasmus exchange at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul and a Fulbright fellowship at the University of California, Irvine, where he has lived since 2018.
Since 2018, Tim has been a member of the Design Group for the Disaster STS Research Network and the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE).
Tim is a member of Orange County Environmental Justice, working on a soil lead and bioremediation campaign, and active in the International Monitor Formosa Plastics Alliance.
Read about his work here.
