Malte Rodl

Currently, I am Research Associate at the Sustainable Consumption Institute working with Prof Frank Boons. My research focuses on (1) (un-)sustainabilities of plastics and how to develop and plan interdisciplinary research projects (Material Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences) aiming at tackling the associated issues; and (2) new methodologies for the evaluation of policy investments into IT technologies in the UK.

I am also involved in former SCI-member Dr Wouter Spekkink's (now Erasmus University Rotterdam) project on the coordination of grassroots innovation networks.

I completed a PhD from The University of Manchester in July 2019, with institutional and financial support from the Sustainable Consumption Institute. My work centred around the social construction of meat alternatives, specifically concerning how eaters and makers of meat alternatives negotiate relationships to meat as an established and popular foodstuff and cultural entity. Building my work on categorisation studies and social movement studies, I collected print advertisements (1985–2017), conducted interviews with national and international manufacturers of meat alternatives, and analysed consumer voices on social media. The work was supervised by Prof Frank Boons and Dr Josephine Mylan (both AMBS, The University of Manchester), and examined by Prof Alan Warde (Sociology, The University of Manchester) and Prof Mike Goodman (Geography, University of Reading).

In this time, I have also worked on Dr Wouter Spekkink's project on the coordination of grassroots innovation networks (Research Assistant), conducted literature reviews for the Vegan Society on carbon footprints of various diets for their Plate Up campaign (consulting), and with the Economic and Social Research Council (research internship) on Artificial Intelligence in the UK service sector (in preparation for UKRI funding).

I consider myself an interdisciplinary scholar interested in the interaction of technology, society, and any kind of change (usually concerning sustainability), which leads my research to be in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, and Innovation Studies. — Foundational to my interests is my MSc degree in Industrial Ecology (an interdisciplinary degree on systems and sustainability) in an Erasmus Mundus programme (completed at Leiden University and TU Delft in the Netherlands, Waseda University in Japan, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden). During this time, I was also on a research internship at the Mercator Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin. Previous to that I completed a work-integrated undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering (BEng) at the DHBW Lörrach, Germany, a university of applied sciences; the associated 3-year (part-time) work experience allowed me very practical insights into engineering.

Since I enjoy programming in my spare time and am lucky enough to know people who need this knowledge, I have been commissioned in the past to program various things for neuroscience laboratories for the University of Valparaìso, Chile, and Liverpool John Moores University; among others, I created a suite of highly-configurable desktop-based and mobile cognitive neuroscience experiments.

Besides a few Graduate Teaching Assistant positions at the University of Manchester in 2018 and 2019 (on qualitative and quantitative methods), I have created a module on SDG2 (Zero Hunger) for an online course titled 'Creating a Sustainable World' at The University of Manchester's University College for Interdisciplinary learning, which any undergraduate can take for credits.

Currently, I have no teaching duties.

For my PhD dissertation I collected print advertisements for meat and dairy alternatives. They were printed between 1985 and 2017 in three different UK-based consumer-facing veg*an magazines¹. There are 557 printed and 319 unique adverts (of at least a quarter page in size) for meat alternatives, which I have all indexed and analysed for my work. The set on dairy alternatives is unexplored yet in my raw data, but I expect around 150 advertisements. I am happy to provide an index or the full data sets upon request. Please get in touch if you would like to access and/or work with the data!

¹ The Vegetarian, 1985–2017. Cook Vegetarian!, 2008–2015, then renamed to Veggie, 2015–2017. Vegan Life 2015–2017.