Bettina Stoetzer is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, migration, and urban social justice. Bettina is currently an associate professor of anthropology at MIT. Bettina received her MA in sociology, anthropology and media studies from the University of Goettingen and completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. Before coming to MIT, Bettina was a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Bettina's forthcoming book, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration and Urban Life in Berlin (under contract with Duke University Press), draws on fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as ecologists, botanists, nature enthusiasts, and other Berlin residents to illustrate how human-environment relations have become a key register through which urban citizenship and racial inequalities are articulated in contemporary Europe. Bettina is also the author of a book on feminism and anti-racism, titled InDifferenzen: Feministische Theorie in der Antirassistischen Kritik (InDifferences: Feminist Theory in Antiracist Criticism, argument, 2004), and she co-edited Shock and Awe. War on Words together with Bregje van Eekelen, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Anna Tsing (New Pacific Press, 2004). Bettina is currently working on a new project on urban wildlife mobility, climate change, and nationalism in the US and Germany.
RCC Research Project: Becoming-More-Than Urban: Wildlife Mobilities, Borders, and the Resilience of Cities in an Era of Environmental Change
Selected Publications:
- “Ailanthus Altissima, or the Botanical Afterlives of European Power.” In Botanical City, edited by Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jasper. Berlin: JOVIS, forthcoming.
- “Feral Fever: Viruses, Pigs, and Humans Co-Evolve in a Deadly Dance.” In Feral Atlas, edited by Anna Tsing et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.
- “Wildes Brandenburg: Engaging “Unruly Nature” in Berlin’s Peripheries.” In Ecologies of Socialisms: Germany, Nature, and the Left in History, Politics and Culture, edited by Scott Moranda and Eli Rubin. Bern: Peter Lang, forthcoming.
- “Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2018): 295–332.
- “A Path Through the Woods: Remediating Affective Landscapes in Documentary Asylum Worlds.” TRANSIT 9, no. 2 (2014): 1–23 (special issue: Contemporary Remediations of Race and Ethnicity in German Visual Cultures)
- “Wild Barbecuing: Urban Citizenship and the Politics of (Trans-)Nationality in Berlin’s Tiergarten.” In Transnationalism and the German City, edited by Jeffrey Diefendorf and Janet Ward, 73–86. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.