Biography

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 Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 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 border politics in the US and Germany. At MIT, Bettina teaches classes on urban life and ethnography, race and migration, environmental justice, gender, science and technology, climate change, and the politics of nature in Germany.

Research

Bettina’s research combines perspectives on ecology and environmental change with an analysis of migration, race and social justice. Her work is informed by epistemologies and methods of feminist anthropology and science studies, as well as her previous training in the history of social movements in Europe.

Bettina’s book, "Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature" (Duke University Press, December 2022), draws on ethnographic fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as ecologists and nature enthusiasts in Berlin to illustrate that human-environment relations have become a key register through which citizenship is articulated in contemporary Europe. More specifically, the book examines several sites that have figured prominently in German national imaginaries—urban wastelands, gardens, forests, and parks in the city and its fringes— and shows how ethnic and class inequalities are reconfigured in conflicts over the use, knowledge and management of “nature” and green spaces in Berlin. The book also develops the concept of the ruderal (from Latin rudus, rubble), a term originally coined by West Berlin botanists after WWII to refer to communities that inhabit “disturbed” and inhospitable environments in the city: the spaces alongside roads and train tracks, urban wastelands or rubble fields. The notion of the ruderal offers an analytic framework for rethinking the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. Exploring Berlin as ruderal city, the book directs attention towards often unnoticed, cosmopolitan ways of remaking the urban fabric and thus to practices that disrupt a social order in which only specific kinds of human-environment relations are appealing. These range from botanical encounters in the city’s rubble after WWII, to contemporary urban gardening practices, to informal economies and “wild barbecuing” by Turkish and Southeast Asian migrants in urban parks, to East African refugees’ stories about living in uncanny forests in Berlin’s peripheries.

Bettina’s current book project, “Unsettling Refuge: Borders and More-than-Human Mobilities in an Era of Environmental Change,” examines practices of ecological care in the context of climate change, social and racial inequality, and a shifting politics of borders in the US and Germany.  Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with policy makers, wildlife ecologists, ornithologists, foresters, farmers, hunters, birders, and environmental stewards in Germany and the US, this project explores how ecological degradation and human built environments shape patterns of wildlife mobility across water, land and air. Tracking practices of care and management of wildlife, the project first asks: When do wildlife mobilities become a matter of political concern or an affair of the state? In what ways do wildlife management, conservation, and scientific knowledge production about moving animals get enlisted into settler-colonial logics or shifting border regimes that regulate human and nonhuman mobilities across national, regional, and urban/rural boundaries? Secondly, the book shows how precarious human wildlife encounters begin to transform scientific and public understandings of what it means to create refuge and build more livable environments on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

Selected Publications

Teaching

21A.00
Introduction to Anthropology: Comparing Human Cultures

Through the comparative study of different cultures, anthropology explores fundamental questions about what it means to be human. Seeks to understand how culture shapes societies, from the smallest island in the South Pacific to the largest Asian metropolis, and affects the way institutions work, from scientific laboratories to Christian mega-churches. Provides a framework for analyzing diverse facets of human experience, such as gender, ethnicity, language, politics, economics, and art.

21A.132J / 21G.058J
Race and Migration in Europe

Addresses the shifting politics of nation, ethnicity, and race in the context of migration and globalization in Europe. Provides students with analytical tools to approach global concerns and consider Europe from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. Familiarizes students with the ways in which histories of migration, travel, and colonial encounters shape contemporary Europe. Introduces the concepts of transnationalism, diasporic cultures, racism, ethnicity, asylum, and mobility via case studies and materials, including film, ethnography, fiction, and autobiography.

21A.402J
City Living: Ethnographies of Urban Worlds

Introduces the ways in which anthropologists have studied cities. Addressing the question of what constitutes the boundaries of life in the city, students familiarize themselves with key themes - such as the relation between city and countryside; space and place; urban economies; science; globalization; migration; nature/culture; kinship, race, gender, class, and memory - that have guided anthropological analyses of cities across the world. Via engagement with case studies and their own small fieldwork projects, students gain experience with different ethnographic strategies for documenting urban life. Taught in English.

21A.404
Living Through Climate Change (first offered in Spring 2024)

Uses anthropological approaches to better understand those social and political forces shaping climate change as well as proposed solutions, including those leveraging technical and scientific tools. Examines how climate change is bound up, historically and today, with other processes — including land dispossession, pollution, resource insecurity, industrial agriculture, eroding infrastructure, racial housing discrimination, and job loss. Explores perspectives on social justice, community engagement, and lived experiences of climate change – and their implications for science, engineering, and industry. Engages ethnographic case studies that address unequal climate impacts, the effects of policy, and ongoing mitigation efforts unfolding in agriculture, coastal engineering, architecture, urban planning, global migration, and historical repair. Includes field trips during class time.

21A.407J / 21G.057J / WGS.275J / STS.022J
Gender, Race and Environmental Justice

Provides an introduction to the analysis of gender in science, technology, and environmental politics from a global perspective. Familiarizes students with central objects, questions, and methods in the field. Examines existent critiques of the racial, sexual and environmental politics at stake in techno-scientific cultures. Draws on material from popular culture, media, fiction, film, and ethnography. Addressing specific examples from across the globe, students also explore different approaches to build more livable environments that promote social justice.

21G.417
Cultural Geographies of Germany: Nature, Culture and Politics

Examines the relationship between nature, geography, and power in 20th- and 21st-century German culture. Familiarizes students with a series of themes in science, engineering, literature, urban planning and everyday life that have played a central role in German national imaginaries and concepts of citizenship. Engaging specific examples and historical, ethnographic, literary and visual material, students explore how human-environment relations have figured prominently in German national identity, its economic power, and global connections. 

Awards

News

MIT welcomes nine MLK Scholars for 2024-25 - Leslie Jonas and Christine Taylor-Butler are hosted by MIT Anthropology Faculty Members

Institute Community and Equity Office | MIT News

September 11, 2024

Every year since 1991, MIT has welcomed outstanding visiting scholars to campus through the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program. The Institute aspires to attract candidates who are, in King’s words, “trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom.”

MLK Scholars enhance the intellectual and cultural life of the Institute through teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and through active research collaborations with faculty. They work within MIT’s academic departments, but also across fields such as medicine, the arts, law, and public service. The program honors King’s life and legacy by expanding and extending the reach of our community.

Joining MIT in January 2025, Leslie Jonas, an elder member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, is an Indigenous land and water conservationist with a focus on weaving traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM).

Christine Taylor-Butler ’81, member of the 2023–24 MLK Visiting Scholars cohort is extending her visit with MIT for an additional year: she will build on her existing partnerships on campus and in the local communities in promoting STEAM literacy for children.

Meet the 2024 tenured professors in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences | MIT News

September 10, 2024

Amy Moran-Thomas is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied — often inequitably — by people in their ordinary lives.

Bettina Stoetzer is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and social justice in Europe and the U.S. Bettina’s award-winning book, “Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 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 become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in Europe.

Associate Professor Bettina Stoetzer receives 2024 Ruth A. and James Levitan Prize

November 21, 2023

The Levitan Prize was inaugurated in 1990 and is awarded annually as a research fund to support innovative and creative scholarship in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Awarded for "Unsettling Refuge: Disrupted Mobilities in Multispecies Worlds"

Stoetzer’s proposal promises to broaden and deepen the fieldwork underpinning her exciting second book project on multispecies worldmaking.

Congratulations to Bettina Stoetzer on winning the 2023 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book Ruderal City!

Svetlana Borodina | CASTAC Co-Chair

September 28, 2023

Bettina Stoetzer’s Ruderal City is an imaginative and beautifully written ethnography of how Berlin’s forests, gardens, peripheries, and blasted landscapes and rubble fields (now obscured but not disappeared) have become, post-World War II and again post-1989, an uncanny home for heterogeneous lives and world-making. Ruderal City re-reads Berlin’s famous forests and gardens as spaces of exclusion, where refugees inhabit the uncanny ruins of the socialist built/forested landscape.

Living Climate Futures 2022 MIT Anthro DV Lab Videos

April 21, 2023

Students from MIT Anthropology's DV Lab class shot footage documenting 2022's Living Climate Futures events including: Indigenous Earth Day, Environmental Justice and Climate Resilience Tour at GreenRoots in Chelsea, and EcoTown Workshop Event.

Living Climate Futures Event Shows a Holistic Way Forward in Climate Fight

article by Stephanie M. McPherson

May 2, 2022

The sun shone bright and warm on the Dertouzos Amphitheater at the Stata Center this past Earth Day. A banner stating “Our Future is Fossil Free — Divest Now” waved from between two trees as a panel of Indigenous leaders and thinkers from across the country talked about their experiences with climate activism and their worldviews that place humanity as one with the rest of the Earth.

"Expanding imagination for a livable future" - A conversation with Bettina Stoetzer in "Said and Done"

Interview by MIT SHASS Communications | MIT SHASS Said and Done Magazine

March 9, 2022

Series: Solving Climate | Humanistic Perspectives from MIT

In this ongoing series, MIT faculty, students, and alumni in the humanistic fields share perspectives that are significant for solving climate change and mitigating its myriad social and ecological impacts. Bettina Stoetzer is the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT; her research combines perspectives on ecology and environmental change with an analysis of migration, race, and social justice. Here she shares insights from anthropology and from her forthcoming book, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration and Urban Life in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022).

 

Links

2019 “Rethinking Urban Nature and Migration,” an interview with Bettina Stoetzer in Cultural Anthropology, December 2019, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/rethinking-nature-an-interview-with-bettina-stoetzer

“The Multispecies World of Technology,” an Interview with Elaine Gan and Bettina Stoetzer

“Feral Technologies: Making and Unmaking Multispecies Dumps,” an Interview with Bettina Stoetzer, Anna Tsing, and Elaine Gan