Yvonne Pfeilschifter has been a doctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center 1512 since 2022. She studied Media and Communication at Universität Passau, as well as Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. While working as a student assistant in the junior research group "Audio-visual Rhetorics of Affect" (2017–2021), she contributed to the development of a digital method of film analysis. This method is fundamental to the project's systematic investigation of feature films, documentaries, documentary series, and social media videos, with the aim of reconstructing an audiovisual discourse of the climate crisis.

In her dissertation, Yvonne Pfeilschifter explores the poetics of serial nature documentaries in the context of the climate crisis, focusing on dominant world projections that present the planet as a resource for knowledge and pleasure, primarily for Western societies, and therefore relying heavily on the binary opposition of nature and culture. For more recent series the urgency of the climate crisis can be described as colliding with an established temporality of timelessness, which is explored through audiovisual figurations de- and re-stabilizing viewers' embodied world perceptions. Her research also engages with feminist film theory and true crime narratives.

Articles

Poetics of Activism in Climate Crisis Documentaries. Listening to Indigenous Voices (with Matthias Grotkopp and Leona Schleicher). In: Alexis Bennett, John Richardson und Annette Davison (eds.): Soundtracks of Climate Change. London 2026 (in preparation).

Ausrichten und Auflösen – Intervenierende Formatierungen audiovisueller Bilder (with Matthias Grotkopp and Leona Schleicher). In: Jürgen Brokoff, Karin Gludovatz und Matthias Warstat (eds.): Intervenierende Künste. Begriffe – Verfahren – Prozesse. Zürich 2026, S. 143–168. https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/intervenierende-kuenste-8563

Von Fakten zu gelebtem Wissen – Ein Barcamp zur Klimakrise (with Constanze Albrecht, Klara Beetz, Lars Dolkemeyer, Matthias Grotkopp, Pablo Trujillo, Petra Wodtke). In: Intervening Arts, 2025. https://interveningarts.com/de/articles/barcamp

"Everyone must be a scientist". Indigenes Wissen als Intervention in den audiovisuellen Diskurs der Klimakrise (with Matthias Grotkopp and Leona Schleicher). In: montage AV 32 (2), 2023, S. 71–91.

‚Inside the Doomsday Machine‘. Die affektrhetorische Bedeutung des ‚Inside‘ und seine Konsequenzen für das ‚Outside‘ im Finanzkrisenfilm THE BIG SHORT. In: mediaesthetics – Zeitschrift für Poetologien audiovisueller Bilder 4, 2021. www.mediaesthetics.org/index.php/mae/article/view/88 

Manual. Annotieren mit Advene und der AdA-Filmontologie (with João Pedro Prado, Rebecca Zorko, Anton Buzal, Thomas Scherer, Jasper Stratil, Jan-Hendrik Bakels). In: AdA-Toolkit, 2021. https://www.ada.cinepoetics.fu-berlin.de/ada-toolkit

Talks

Ausrichten und Auflösen: Intervenierende Formatierungen digitaler Bewegtbilder (with Matthias Grotkopp and Leona Schleicher). Ringvorlesung Intervenierende Künste. Politische und ästhetische Potentiale, Freie Universität Berlin, 25.06.2024.

Disrupting the Horizontal – Digital Landscapes in Movement (with Leona Schleicher). Digital Cultures in/of the Anthropocene, Cinepoetics, Freie Universität Berlin, 29.11.2022.

"The story has been told many times by men" – Gender in Serial True Crime Documentaries. Framing [Serial] Killing: Changing Narratives, Uniwersytet Warszawski, 16.11.–18.11.2022.

Rock solid? Poetics of Landscape in Movement (with Matthias Grotkopp and Leona Schleicher). (Re)thinking Landscape: Way of Knowing / Ways of Being, Yale University, New Haven, 29.09.–01.10.2022.

Die Eskalation als zirkulierende Figur im audiovisuellen Diskurs der Klimakrise (with Matthias Grotkopp). Regelhaftigkeit und kreative Produktion, SFB 1512 "Intervening Arts", Freie Universität Berlin, 15.12.2023.