New Researchers at the MPIfG

The MPIfG welcomes three postdocs and three visiting researchers to Cologne this winter semester. Alessia Aspide from Leiden University will work as a postdoc in Lucio Baccaro’s Political Economy Research Area until the end of September 2026; her project is “Politics of Preferences for Fiscal Policy.” Lucinda Cadzow, most recently of the London School of Economics, is also conducting research on financial issues. During her two-year stay at the Institute, she will work on the international political economy of global tax policy. Joining the MPIfG from the University of Hamburg, Sören Altstaedt’s research interests are energy planning, sustainability and climate change, and the history and sociology of the future. During his time at the MPIfG, he will be investigating in his project “(Em)Powering the Not-Yet – Who Gets to Imagine German Energy Futures?” what the future of energy supply in Germany might look like. Julia Ballester, a doctoral candidate at The New School for Social Research, has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for four months since September 2020. She is researching the history of financialization in Argentina and focuses on the female perspective in her project “The Politics of Women’s Management of Household Finances.” Another visiting researcher, Dasha Kuletskaya, will be in Cologne until the end of January. Kuletskaya completed her doctorate at RWTH Aachen University. The primary focus of her research is on housing, in which context she is examining the role of future scenarios in “The Power of Fiction: Unravelling the Social Construction of the Economic Value of Real Estate.” Théo Régniez is a doctoral researcher at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and will be visiting the MPIfG until the end of February 2025. The project he will be working on during his stay is “Describing and Forecasting the Economy in Uncertain Situations: A Sociology of Economic Forecasts in Times of Crisis.”