Dr. Kathleen Heft
Former Researcher Consensus and Conflict Department
fon: 0049 (0) 30-200754-403Dr. Kathleen Heft is a cultural scientist. She researches discourses and practices of othering in unified Germany and works with approaches from gender studies, postcolonial studies and critical migration research.
As part of the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Gender as a Category of Knowledge” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she examined media discourses on the killing mother in unified Germany. In her dissertation “Infanticide in the media. A discourse analysis of East-West German dominance relations' (2020), she shows how East Germany is understood as the other side of the (West) German norm. The concept of ossification she developed captures this specific form of othering.
Dr. Kathleen Heft conducted research at the DeZIM Institute in the project “Integration without elites?”. Until 2019, she worked on the “Toolbox Gender and Diversity in Teaching” project at Freie Universität Berlin. She is a member of the Gender Studies Association (Gender e.V.).
Research focus
- Discourse space East Germany
- Ossification
- Gender intersectional
- Infanticide discourses
- Postcolonial theory in post-socialist contexts
- Migration to the GDR
- (East) Germany as a post-migrant society