Verena Schreiber

Professor Verena Schreiber is a Professor of Geography and its Didactics with a focus on Human Geography at the Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg (Pedagogical University of Freiburg), where she also serves as Head of the Institute of Geography. She has held this position since October 2015, initially as a Tenure-Track Professor (2015-2022) and then as a full Professor (since April 2022). Prior to this, she worked as scientific staff at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2005-2015), University of Osnabrück (2004-2005), and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2004). She also held a Visiting Academic position at Loughborough University, UK (March-July 2015) and will serve as a Guest Professor at the University of Vienna (Summer Semester 2025).

Professor Schreiber's research focuses on transformative geographical education, critical geographies of childhood, feminist geographies, and critical cartography. Her work examines how socio-ecological challenges impact children's life situations and what demands this places on geographical educational processes. She develops transformative educational practices that recognize increasingly complex realities of children's lives, enable new forms of cooperation and collective knowledge production in geography classrooms, and open up emancipatory action possibilities. She explores these themes through the lenses of engaged pedagogy, feminist education, intersectionality, governmentality, discourse theory, and critical cartography.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on the intersection of childhood, urban spaces, and education in the context of smart cities and sustainable development. She has made significant contributions to understanding how digital transformations affect children's urban experiences and how geographical education can respond to these challenges. Her work often employs critical theoretical frameworks, particularly drawing on Foucauldian governmentality and feminist theories, to analyze spatial production and power relations in educational contexts.

• WISAG Prize for the best social and humanities dissertation at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2011)

Professor Schreiber actively supervises bachelor's and master's students and has several ongoing research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), including 'Kindheit in der Smart City' (since 2021) and 'Die Stadt als Erziehungsagentur' (since 2019). She collaborates with researchers like Dana Ghafoor-Zadeh and Antonia Appel on projects examining children's experiences in urban environments. She also leads the 'Sommerschule 'Transformative Geographische Bildung'' and is working on the 'Handbuch 'Transformative Geographische Bildung'.'

Professor Schreiber heads a research team consisting of academic staff members Dana Reul and Antonia Appel, along with student assistants Jannika Morbitzer and Leonique Vollmer. Her research group explores transformative geographical education, critical geographies of childhood, and feminist perspectives in geography education. They investigate how socio-ecological challenges impact children's lives and what this means for geographical educational processes, with a particular focus on urban spaces, smart city developments, and educational inequalities.