Katina Waidele, M.A.
Katina Waidele is a doctoral candidate and research assistant since October 2025. Her doctoral project focuses on cultural notions and interpretations of climate-related changes in the non-human world. She is particularly interested in the way people relate to landscapes that are transforming significantly due to global warming.
She studied Social Anthropology in Göttingen and completed her studies in 2023 with a thesis on survival formats on YouTube. In her thesis, she examined how specific ideas about the self, the body, and nature are negotiated in contemporary pop culture and how these ideas are related to cultural specific notions of an apocalyptic future.
Since 2023, she has been studying Creative Writing at Literaturinstitut in Hildesheim, where she is working on a creative writing project based on her doctoral thesis that deals with individual experiences of loss resulting from climate change.
Human-induced climate change is now widely recognized as a scientific fact. This results in collective experiences of loss (e.g., loss of habitable land, loss of positive expectations for the future, loss of an anchorage in the natural environment, that is perceived as relatively secure). Such experiences of loss give rise to a variety of cultural practices that individuals and social groups adopt in order to cope with the reality of climate change. The natural environment, as an active trigger of these already felt or anticipated losses, is placed in a specific relationship to the human world and thus forms the cultural-specific background for many loss practices. One of these loss practices is “escapism” or „the flight from reality“ within the planetary system and the construction of alternative counterworlds that offer refuge and protection. Phenomenological approaches will be used to better understand such tendencies.