Behret, Marius - Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research

Marius Behret

Doctoral Researcher

Thematic Area Environment and Society
Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology
Research Group Computational Social Sciences for Extreme Events

Research Group Computational Humanities (Leipzig University)

Helmholtz Centre
for Environmental Research − UFZ
Permoserstr. 15
04318 Leipzig

marius.behret@ufz.de

Research Interests

Climate Crisis & Social Justice

Discourse Analysis

Computational Social Science

Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning

Education

since 07/2026

WS 2023/2024

PhD Digital Humanities, Leipzig University & UFZ

Erasmus Semester, Polytechnic University of Barcelona

2022 − 2026

MSc Digital Humanities, Leipzig University

2018 − 2022

BA Communication & Media Studies, Leipzig University

Current Projects

since 07/2026

PhD-Project, "Inequalities in Climate Discourse", IDEAS - Helmholtz School for Integrated Data Science in Environmental & Life Sciences https://ideas.helmholtz.de/research/

Finished Projects

11/2025 – 12/2025

Research assistant, "AlgorithMIX#DDR: Geschichte in Social Media erforschen und spielerisch vermitteln", Institute for Cutural Studies, Leipzig University

01/2025 – 12/2025

Research assistant, "Societas Jablonoviana zu Leipzig (1774-1992). Ein polnischer Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte Sachsens. Digitale Wissensbasis", Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig

05/2024 – 12/2024

Research assistant, "Seed Funding: German 7B LLM", ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig

01/2022 – 03/2024

Research assistant, "Framing Big Data", Institute for Communication and Media Studies, Leipzig University

Publications

2026

Klähn, J., Graf, P. L., Neubert, A. & Behret, M. (2026). Die DDR im TikTok-Feed: Zwischen Algorithmus und Erinnerung. Nicht nur Text, nicht nur Daten (DHd2026), Wien, Österreich. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18999659

2025

Behret, M., Mühleder, P., Tomicka-Krumrey, E., Klähn, J., Schmidt, K., Hameister, W., Naether, F. & Goldhahn, D. (2025). VINDA – Visual Interface for Networked Digitized Archives. Digital Humanities Day Leipzig 2025. https://fdhl.info/veranstaltungen/digital-humanities-day-leipzig/dhdl25/dhdl25-projektuebersicht/#vinda

2023

Knorr, C., Niekler, A., Behret, M. & Pentzold, C. (2023). Cultural Motifs on #bigdata - A Semi-Automated Topic Modeling from a Socio-Cultural Constructionist Perspective. Digital Humanities 2023. Collaboration as Opportunity (DH2023), Graz, Austria. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8107453

Integration plattform

Societal Transformations
towards Sustainability

News

Workshop on the governance of CCS

From 1 to 2 June 2026, the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology hosted a workshop on strategies for the governance of multidimensional risks associated with carbon capture and storage.
learn more

Exploring Possibilities in Digital Laboratories

On October 8–9, the international workshop “Real World Labs versus Solutions – Exploring Possibilities in Digital Laboratories” took place at UFZ. Researchers from six countries discussed real-world labs, digital and playful experimentation, and solution approaches. A summary is now available here.

Mariana Madruga de Brito receives Arne Richter Award 2025

Mariana Madruga de Brito has received the Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists. With it, the European Geosciences Union honours scientists for their important contributions to the Earth, planetary and space sciences. The awards were celebrated during the EGU General Assembly 2025, which was held from 27 April – 2 May.

more News & Highlights

Publications

Green European Revisited: Environmental Behaviour and Attitudes in Europe in the Face of the Polycrisis. 2026: This book examines how environmental attitudes and behaviors are evolving across Europe in an age of polycrisis. Drawing on decades of International Social Survey Programme Environment data, this volume traces shifts in worldviews and lifestyles, and generally on how Europeans think about environmental problems, how their priorities change over time, and how everyday lifestyles differ across countries. It also examines changing ecological risk perceptions, public trust in science, ideas of progress and growth, and the ways in which political identities shape perceptions of global change.

Fully revised new edition:
Groß, M.; McGoey, L.: Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies. 2nd edition 2023 (Paperback 2024).

The REGREEN NBS Handbook (2024) "From concept to action for ecosystem restoration & urban resilience" provides a comprehensive overview of the REGREEN project‘s key findings and outcomes, focusing on Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for urban sustainability in Europe and China. The handbook addresses crucial aspects of NbS design, implementation and governance.

Resilience is the concept of the moment. The coronavirus crisis, the flood disaster in the Ahr valley and the energy shortage have put resilience at the top of the political agenda, including in local authorities. The articles in the book "Die Resiliente Stadt. Konzepte, Konflikte, Lösungen" (ed. S. Kabisch, D. Rink, E. Banzhaf 2024) analyse how existing insights lead to action and how knowledge is used. A deeper understanding of the resilient city is developed by analysing different municipal fields of action.

The new Handbook of Environmental Sociology (ed. M. Sonnberger, A. Bleicher, M. Groß) offers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the broad research field of nature-society relations. It introduces theoretical and methodological approaches in a national and international context and presents the state of research in various fields of environmental sociology. It also highlights the challenges and opportunities of environmental sociological research in co-operation with other disciplines.

Current publications