Bettina Stoetzer

Bettina Stoetzer

Bettina Stoetzer is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization and urban social justice.

Stoetzer’s current book project, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration and Urban Life, explores the changing cultural politics of nature and citizenship in the city of Berlin. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as environmentalists, ecologists and policy makers the book illustrates that human-environment relations have become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in contemporary Europe. More specifically, Ruderal City engages several sites that have figured prominently in German national imaginaries—urban wastelands, gardens, forests and parks—to show how current racial, ethnic and class inequalities are reconfigured in conflicts over the use, knowledge and management of nature and green spaces.

Stoetzer holds an M.A. in Sociology and Media Studies from the University of Goettingen and she completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. Before coming to MIT, Stoetzer was a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. She has published on topics such as transnationalism, cities, affect, ecology and film. She also is the author of a book on feminism and anti-racism in Germany (InDifferenzen, argument, 2004) and has co-edited Shock and Awe: War on Words (New Pacific Press, 2004), a collection of essays that explores the current global situation through the political lives of words.