Lecture by Julia Leser, March 5,14:00

Lecture by Julia Leser (CRC Dynamics of Security, Marburg University) on Wednesday, March 5, 2025; 14:00–15:30 CET.

Discussant: Thorsten Gieser (Institute of Ethnology, CAS)

Julia Leser explores the intersection of socio-ecological transformation, far-right politics, and imaginaries of (un)governability. While renaturation efforts have transformed the post-industrial landscape in Lusatia, Germany, the return of wolves has become a focal point for political instrumentalization, particularly among far-right movements like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD instrumentalizes wolf populations as a symbolic parallel to migration, reinforcing xenophobic fears and violent imaginaries. With an ethnographic lens, this paper explores the far right’s contemporary ‘wolf politics’ and situates the underlying imaginaries of these kind of politics within broader processes of nation- and nature-making, tracing, in particular, how the governance and extermination of species have historically mirrored colonial and nationalist endeavours. Leser shows how the far right’s rhetoric on wolves reflects deeper entanglements of ecological transformation, territorial entitlement, and exclusionary identity politics. With ‘wolf politics’, histories of violence resurface in modern political discourse.

Visit the Joint Seminar of the Department of Mobility and Migration & the Department of Ecological Anthropology at:

The Institute of Ethnology, CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1, Conference Room, 5th Floor

or

Online via MS Teams: here (Meeting ID: 331 197 278 352; Passcode AM3MP2gU)

Download PDF here.