The Department of Anthropology is proud to present
The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series

"Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin"
Bettina Stoetzer, associate professor of anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This lecture will be given virtually starting at 3PM.
Join the webinar: https://umich.zoom.us/j/92496167134

ABOUT THE LECTURE
In this talk, Bettina Stoetzer will present materials from her book "Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin." "Ruderal City" traces relationships among people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin as they make their lives in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. She develops the notion of the ruderal—originally an ecological designation for the unruly life that inhabits inhospitable environments such as rubble, roadsides, train tracks, and sidewalk cracks—to theorize Berlin as a “ruderal city.”

Stoetzer explores sites in and around Berlin that have figured in German national imaginaries—gardens, forests, parks, and rubble fields—to show how racial, class, and gender inequalities shape contestations over today’s uses and knowledges of urban nature. Drawing on fieldwork with gardeners, botanists, migrant workers, refugees, public officials, and nature enthusiasts while charting human and more-than-human worlds, Stoetzer offers a wide-ranging ethnographic portrait of Berlin’s postwar ecologies that reveals emergent futures in the margins of European cities. Brimming with stories that break down divides between environmental perspectives and the study of migration and racial politics, Berlin’s ruderal worlds help us rethink the space of nature and culture and the categories through which we make sense of urban life in inhospitable times.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bettina Stoetzer is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and social justice in the US and Germany. Bettina received her M.A. in Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies from the University of Goettingen and completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. Before coming to MIT, she was a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Bettina’s book, "Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Life in Berlin" (Duke University Press, December 2022), draws on fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as ecologists, nature enthusiasts and other Berlin residents to illustrate how human-environment relations have become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in contemporary Europe. The ethnographic research and writing for this project has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, and a UC Chancellor’s fellowship. 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 wildlife mobility, climate change, and nationalism in the US and Germany. At MIT, Bettina teaches classes on urban life and ethnography, race and migration, environmental justice, gender, science and technology, and the politics of nature in Germany.