Anna-Maria Köhnke

Anna-Maria Köhnke is a PhD student in the Politics Department.

Education & Experience

Anna-Maria Köhnke is a PhD student in the Politics Department. She completed both her MA in Political Economy (Research Route) and her BA (Hons) in Politics, Philosophy & Economics at the University of Manchester, which has facilitated her interest in multidisciplinary approaches in the social sciences. Her previous research explored the link between working conditions and wellbeing through her BA dissertation titled “Work as wellbeing: labour conditions in historical perspective” and her MA dissertation titled “Challenging our conceptions of work: sex work between fiction and reality”

ORCID profile

Project

Thesis title: Establishing a ‘Work Index’ of wellbeing – An investigation into working conditions as a fundamental welfare indicator

Her research project aims to expand the study of environmental political economy by providing a toolkit to assess the quality of someone’s work. This matters for the creation of future green jobs as well as for tackling the crisis of social reproduction. Foundation of her project is a broad definition of work that encompasses production, reproduction, and consumption work which is suitable to analyse social inequalities as expressed by working conditions.

Research interests

Anna-Maria explores the field of ‘work’ / ’labour’ through a variety of approaches from politics, economics, philosophy, development, and sociology. In particular, she aims to make the study of working conditions more inclusive of reproductive labour as well as other commonly feminised professions and to bring the quality of work onto the environmental policy agenda. She is further interested in using popular culture analysis in political economy, in the role workplace participation plays for political movements, and in the history of work in general. Moreover, she has founded the Diversifying Economics Network and currently works as a translator for IREF Europe – Institute for Research in Economic and Fiscal Issues.