Katharina Berr

About

Katharina Berr is a research associate in the research group “Reorganization of Knowledge Practices” and a doctoral researcher at Berlin University of the Arts. She previously studied media and communication studies at the University of Passau and Stockholm University, as well as design thinking at the d-school at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam.

At Weizenbaum Institute, Katharina conducts research at the intersection of science and technology studies and organization and management research. Her work focuses on the expectations and challenges facing professional expertise in digital publics. In her dissertation, “Setting the mood for science: How experts and laypeople uphold the cultural authority of science,” she examines, among other things, how citizens organized in online communities during the Covid pandemic to defend scientific expertise against post-truth phenomena. Her research draws on qualitative methods, particularly (digital) ethnographic and multimodal approaches.

In addition, Katharina works as a science communicator for the YouTube format “Menschen und Muster,” produced in collaboration with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb). She also shares her practical experience from this project through workshops aimed at strengthening social science communication.

Research Group: Reorganizing Knowledge Practices