22/04/2025
© UDE / Fabian Strauch
Elena Beregow’s research focuses on the relationship between temperature and society, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. The sociologist has taken up one of three junior professorships at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities, based at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and will establish a research group on the 'Sociology of Transpiration'.
People sweat – but who sweats under what circumstances is primarily a question of social conditions. Sociologist Elena Beregow investigates the relationship between temperature and society, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. She examines sweating as a process that is contested in social and political regards and she is interested in the social upheavals and tensions resulting from global warming: "From a sociological perspective, heat reinforces inequalities: it hits certain groups particularly hard due to unequal access and vulnerabilities," Beregow explains. In April 2025, she took up a junior professorship at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr), which is based at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen. At the College, she will establish the research group ‘Sweat – Sociology of Transpiration in the Age of Global Warming’. A central research question is how the modern ideal of coolness and distance is changing in the face of increasingly extreme heatwaves.
Depending on the context, sweating evokes different evaluations: in wellness and sports it tends to have a positive connotation, while in pop culture it is associated with protest and transgression. Elena Beregow also wants to shed light on these cultural patterns of interpretation between devaluation, aestheticisation and politicisation – using a qualitative research design that combines social-theoretical, sensory-sociological and cultural-historical perspectives. As her research interests intersect with cultural studies, literature, media studies and history, she appreciates the opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange at the UA Ruhr and the College: “Here you get completely different perspectives on the research topic than from your own discipline – which ideally also applies vice versa. What particularly appeals to me about the College is the principle of thematic openness and the structure of ‘permanent’ professorships and changing international fellows.” Elena Beregow also intends to expand international collaborations, for example with the Heat Lab at the University of California in Los Angeles. It is important to her to include perspectives from the Global South.
Prior to her appointment, Elena Beregow conducted research and taught at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich (2020-2025) and the University of Hamburg (2015-2020). She already explored thermal figures in social theory in her dissertation, for which she received the dissertation prize of the Sociological Theory Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS) in 2022. She is co-editor of the journal Pop. Kultur und Kritik. Between 2022 and 2025, she was an associated researcher in the ERC-funded project ‘Cryosocieties’ at Goethe University Frankfurt and a member of several DFG networks. Elena Beregow studied sociology in Hamburg, Göttingen and Copenhagen.
Further information:
Contact:
Prof. Dr Elena Beregow, College for Social Sciences and Humanities & University of Duisburg Essen, Faculty of Social Sciences; Phone: +49 201/183 65 66; e-mail: elena.beregow@college-uaruhr.de
Press Contact:
Melina Wachtling, Phone: +49 201/183 65 42; e-mail: melina.wachtling@college-uaruhr.de