Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, November 14, 2016, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Pierce Hall, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

"Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Urban Infra-Structure in a World of Rubble"

Speaker: 

Bettina Stoetzer, Assistant Professor in Global Studies and Languages, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Contact:

Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.

Abstract:

In the years after World War II, large rubble fields dotted the heavily bombed city of Berlin. As the city grew divided during the Cold War, many non-native, so-called ruderal plants flourished in the city’s blasted landscapes and triggered the curiosity of West Berlin botanists. Tracing the plants’ ecologies, a world of cosmopolitan connection and profound environmental change unfolded in front of the botanists’ eyes. In this talk, I draw on the concept of the ruderal (from Latin rudus, rubble) – used by Berlin’s ecologists to refer to communities that spontaneously inhabit disturbed landscapes such as the spaces alongside roads and train tracks, the cracks of sidewalks, urban wastelands or rubble – and expand it for anthropological inquiry of urban infrastructure. Attending to ruderal life, I argue, not only opens up new possibilities for rethinking nature and culture in the city, but also directs attention toward the unintended consequences of anthropogenic landscapes, infrastructure, and migration processes in contemporary urban life. 

Biography: 

Bettina Stoetzer is an Assistant Professor in Global Studies and Languages at MIT. Bettina received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. She also holds an M.A. in Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies from the University of Goettingen, Germany. Before coming to MIT, Stoetzer was a Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Bettina’s research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and urban social justice. Her current book project, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration and Urban Life draws on ongoing fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as environmentalists, ecologists, and policy makers and illustrates that human-environment relations have become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in contemporary Europe. 
 
Bettina Stoetzer has published on topics such as migration and race in Europe, cities, ecology, infrastructure, ruins, radioactivity and wild life, affect, 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, co-edited together with Anna Tsing) – a collection of essays that explores the current global situation through the political lives of words.