Professor

• Community research
• Innovation research
• Expertise and knowledge
• Geographies of crises
• New places of work
• Economic geography

Verena Brinks has been Professor of “Geography of Social Media and Digital Cultures” since September 2019. Her disciplinary focus is primarily on Economic Geography. She researches knowledge and expertise under the conditions of digitality. In this context, she is concerned with “user innovations” in predominantly digitally active communities and the phenomenon of “lay expertise” in the digital space. Another field of research is the examination of new places of work and creativity that are strongly characterized by digitality (e.g. coworking spaces, fab labs). Another focus is research into the geographies of “crises”.

From May 2012 to August 2019, Verena Brinks worked as a research assistant (doctoral candidate and postdoctoral researcher) at the Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research (IRS) in Erkner (near Berlin). In 2016, she completed her doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin on user innovations. In 2012, she completed her diploma studies at the University of Münster with a thesis on coworking spaces (minor subjects: Political Science, Sociology).

Verena Brinks works qualitatively (e.g. spatio-temporal process research, (online) ethnography, qualitative social research).

In the past, she has served as a reviewer for the following journals: Creativity and Innovation Management, Environment and Planning A, Erdkunde, European Planning Studies, Geoforum, GeoJournal, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, Organization Studies, Progress in Human Geography, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, among others