Persons

Directors

The Board of Directors of the Centre for Security and Society comprises five professors from the five different faculties represented at the CSS.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Stolz

Managing Director of CSS

• alexander.stolz@inatech.uni-freiburg.de
• Professorship in Resilience in Technical Systems
  

  Emmy-Noether-Straße 2
  79110 Freiburg

Prof. Dr. Iris Saliterer

• iris.saliterer@vwl.uni-freiburg.de
• Professorship in Public and Non-Profit Management, specializing in Local Government Administration
  

  Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
  Belfortstraße 20
  79098 Freiburg

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hochbruck

• wolfgang.hochbruck@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
• Professorship in North American Studies
  

  English Department | North American Studies
  Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg 
  79098 Freiburg

Prof. Dr. Oliver Müller 

• oliver.mueller@philosophie.uni-freiburg.de
• Professorship in Philosophy with a focus on Contemporary Issues and Technology
  

  Philosophy Seminar 
  Platz der Universität 3
  79098 Freiburg

Prof. Dr. Moritz Hennemann

• moritz.hennemann@jura.uni-freiburg.de
• Chair of Civil Law and Director of the Institute for Media and Information Law
  

  Institute for Media and Information Law
  Rempartstraße 4
  79098 Freiburg 

Research Team

Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann is responsible for the scientific coordination of the research team.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann

Stefan Kaufmann, PhD phil., is an adjunct professor at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Freiburg and research coordinator at the Centre for Security and Society. He has taught at the Universities of Basel and Leipzig, was a fellow at ETH Zurich and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld, and held the chair of cultural sociology at the University of Freiburg and the chair of media theory at the University of Siegen. His work focuses on cultural theory and praxeological research on security, war, technology, and space. He is co-editor of the European Journal for Security Research and heads several projects on civil security at the CSS in Freiburg.

The research team comprises the research assistants involved in projects at the Center for Security and Society.

André Biermann

André Biermann (Dip.-Soc.) has been working as a research assistant for Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann since the end of 2014 (with interruptions). Since March 2022, he has been part of the research team at the CSS as part of the BMBF project LegiNot. There, he investigates Covid-19 as a field of discourse, which he operationalizes using sociological discourse analysis. To this end, he reconstructs practices and patterns of both public legitimation and criticism of relevant measures (e.g., mask mandates) to contain Covid-19 at different levels of disaster control; in the theoretical part, the discourse analysis is linked back to empirical legitimacy research and the sociology of justification using conflict sociology.

Dr. Sabrina Ellebrecht

Sabrina Ellebrecht is a senior researcher at MPI-CSL in Freiburg and a visiting scholar at CSS. From 2019 to 2024, she led and coordinated the project “ZuRecht. Die Polizei in der offenen Gesellschaft” (ZuRecht. The Police in an Open Society). In this project, she examined the relationship between organization and diversity and investigated risks of discrimination in and by the police. Since 2014, she has been part of the research team and a research assistant to Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann in the EU project BESECURE and the BMBF project KOMPASS, as well as a research advisor in the expert dialogue on security research from 2016 to 2019. Her work focuses on political sociology, police research, and critical border, migration, and security studies. Her dissertation (2018) dealt with the emergence of a European external border.

Hannah Friedrich

Hannah Friedrich has been a research assistant at the CSS since November 2024. In the BMBF-funded project “FreiburgRESIST,” she works on ethical issues and problems of security concepts at major events in Freiburg. She studied political science with a focus on political theory and cultural geography in Erlangen, Trondheim, and Freiburg and is pursuing a doctorate in philosophy under Prof. Dr. Oliver Müller at the University of Freiburg.

Markus Jenki

Markus Jenki is a research assistant at CSS working with Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann. After completing the KOMPASS project, which aimed to develop an integrative management system for patient care at sea through structural, organizational, and technical measures, he worked on the BMBF-funded SIKET project (evaluation and further development of safety concepts for railway tunnels). The aim was to use a combination of computer-simulated fire and evacuation scenarios and large-scale realistic exercises to develop approaches for reviewing and improving rescue measures in railway tunnels. Since October 2022, he has been working on the “InGe” project on experiences of violence among public sector employees.

PD Dr. Elisa Orrù

Elisa Orrù heads the Freiburg subprojects and ethics work packages of the Horizon Europe project VIGILANT on disinformation on the internet and the BMBF project Freiburg-RESIST on urban resilience. In addition to her work at the CSS, she is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law (Department of Public Law) in Freiburg. In January 2020, she habilitated at the University of Freiburg and was awarded the venia legendi for philosophy. Her habilitation thesis contains a philosophical analysis of the legitimacy of European security measures in the course of digitalization. In the summer semester of 2023, she held the professorship for modern philosophy at the University of Freiburg.

Yosua Praditya

Yosua Praditya, a social scientist and security researcher from Indonesia, will spend the next three years working on his dissertation under Prof. Stefan Kaufmann as a visiting scholar at the CSS with a scholarship from the Catholic Academic Exchange Service (KAAD). Most recently, he was director of the Centre for Humanitarian and Development Studies in Jakarta.

Zlatko Valentić

Zlatko Valentic is a research assistant at the Husserl Archive at the University of Freiburg and has been working at the Freiburg Centre for Security and Society since 2022. As part of the EU project VIGILANT, he is researching the political and ethical aspects of tracking fake news using modern surveillance technologies. In addition to philosophy, he studied history, political science, and law at the universities of Linz (AT), Salzburg (AT), Nijmegen (NL), Montreal (CA), and Freiburg im Breisgau (D). In 2010, he founded the podcast “Philosophisches-Experiment” (Philosophical Experiment). His research focuses on philosophical hermeneutics and political philosophy.

Members

Members of the CSS are scientists at the university who have research interests in the field of civil security, are involved in CSS activities, or lead projects there.

Faculty of Law

• Prof. Dr. Katharina von Koppenfels-Spies
• Prof. Dr. Moritz Hennemann (Member of the Board of Directors)
• Prof. Dr. Jens-Peter Schneider
• Prof. Dr. Silja Vöneky

Faculty of Philosophy

• Prof. Dr. Melanie Arndt
• Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckling
• Prof. Dr. Sandra Destradi
• Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann
• Prof. Dr. Andreas Mehler
• Prof. Dr. Oliver Müller (Member of the Board of Directors)
• Prof. Dr. Gisela Riescher
• Prof. Dr. Uwe Wagschal

Faculty of Philology

• Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik
• Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hochbruck (Member of the Board of Directors)
• Prof. Dr. Joachim Grage 

Faculty of Economics and Behavioral Sciences

• Prof. Dr. Tim Krieger
• Prof. Dr. Dirk Neumann
• Prof. Dr. Bernhard Neumärker
• Prof. Dr. Iris Saliterer (Faculty of Engineering)

Faculty of Engineering

• Prof. Dr. Stefan Hiermaier
• Prof. Dr. Alexander Stolz (Faculty of Engineering)

Associate members

• Prof. Dr. Ralf Poscher (Max Planck Institute for Research on Crime, Security, and Law)

Administration