Carolin Zorell

About Carolin Zorell

I am a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at the department of Political Science, working in several research projects where I investigate the preconditions and dynamics of political consumerism and, more generally, behaviour change and the transformation of consumption towards environmental sustainability. I focus especially, but not exclusively, on food consumption and sustainability.

In my research, I connect insights from Political Science, Psychology, Sociology and Economics, to gain a better understanding of whether, when and in what ways people act in one way or the other. In particular, I am concerned with the inquiry of how context, self-perceptions and peer-group influences form consumer patterns and thereby enable or hinder the transformation of consumption towards environmental sustainability. For this purpose, I use a combination of different methodological approaches, including quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, experiments and comparative methods.

Before starting at Örebro University as a Postdoc in 2019, I studied International Business at the University of Applied Sciences Pforzheim and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (2006-2010), followed by a Master and Doctorate in Political Science at the University of Mannheim and Essex University (2010-2016). Afterwards, I worked as a researcher in various projects located at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Siegen (2016-2018), as Lecturer in Political Sociology at the University of Mannheim (2018-2019), and as Research Associate at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research.