Thomas Bürk was trained and educated a cultural anthropologist and social geographer, recently working as Professor of Social Work at the IB Hochschule for Health and Social Work Berlin. His research falls mainly into the field of (critical) urban studies, the social production of “public” spaces and the practices of a “pharmacological self” in dealing with everyday work and life in Cities.

Thomas Bürk has been an activist in different social movements for about 15 years before becoming a student of Philosophy, History, Geography and Cultural Anthropology/Cultural Studies at the Humboldt-University Berlin and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He wrote his PhD thesis about the specific local conditions of civic urban cultures in East-German (peripheralized) towns that are facing massive xenophobic and rightwing influences. Acknowledging the continued importance of political economies, his work is firmly grounded in an understanding of the intersectionality of power relations, drawing on the production of space under poststructuralist approaches.