Christopher Zraunig

Welcome

I am an anthropologist of aging, care, and queer life, studying how institutional efforts at diversity and inclusion reshape everyday relations of care, recognition, and belonging in contemporary Germany and the United States.

In my ongoing research, I examine how attempts to repair the long histories of exclusion faced by LGBTQ+ elders take form through welfare institutions, housing projects, professional care practices, and diversity programs. I show that these efforts can generate meaningful forms of safety, recognition, and community, while also producing new tensions around bureaucracy, legibility, deservingness, and the governance of difference.

My dissertation investigates diversification in German eldercare through ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and beyond, with particular attention to how queer elders, caregivers, and service organizations navigate the promises and limits of institutional inclusion. By engaging ethnography alongside verbatim play and other experimental forms, the project also makes a multidisciplinary and multi-modal intervention into how anthropology can represent affect, desire, and institutional life.