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Vita

Anika Oettler holds the chair of Sociology of Development and Social Inequality since 2009. After studying social sciences in Bochum and Hannover, she received her PhD from Hannover. Before coming to Marburg, she was a researcher at the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies in Hamburg (2003-2009).

Her research interests include the sociology of violence, transitional justice studies, critical development sociology, the sociology of inequality, and gender studies. Research has taken her to El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina, Peru and Colombia. Her teaching spans the same interdisciplinary range as her research: she is involved in Marburg’s sociology programs (B.A. and M.A the interdisciplinary masters in “Peace and Conflict Studies”.

Anika Oettler is an associate at the GIGA Institute of Global and Area Studies (Hamburg), a member of the advisory board of the Arnold Bergstrasser Institute (ABI), and various DAAD selection committees. She is a board member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Lateinamerikaforschung and principal investigator in several projects: the Hessian Research Center "Transformations of Political Violence", the competence network "Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict" and the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis. She is also involved in the German-Colombian peace institute CAPAZ as a representative of the UMR.

She has published many articles and two books on transitional justice, historical memory and violence. Erinnerungsarbeit und Vergangenheitspolitik in Guatemala (Memory Work and the Politics of the Past in Guatemala, 2004) deals with the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) and its ecclesiastical equivalent, the Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI). The book describes which influences CEH and REMHI did, or could have had, on communicative and cultural memory. The Guatemalan experience shows the difficulties of treating the past when democratization processes remain fragile and local structures of repression transform, but do not disappear.

The second book, Gewalt und soziale Ordnung in Nicaragua (Violence and Social Order in Nicaragua, 2009) deals with the ambiguity and plurivocality of contemporary discourses on violence, emanating from a variety of hegemonic and less powerful publics. In 2006, Nicaragua was a discursively divided country, with total insecurity and the image of a safe country being antithetical public perceptions. The book describes discursive nodes, political trends, and historical precedents.

The 2017 book, Das Berliner Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen. Entstehung, Verortung, Wirkung (content and introduction), was co-authored with a group of students. It deals with the history of the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, unveiled in Berlin in 2008. How do visitors engage with this memorial? Empirically, the book is based on expert interviews, covert observation, and almost one hundred "express interviews" with visitors. A related article appeared in Memory Studies in 2019. 

Further information about current and completed research is available here.