Christa Wichterich works as a university lecturer, free-lance author and scholar-activist.
She holds a PhD. in sociology, was recently a guest professor for gender politics at Kassel and lecturer for gender studies at Basel University. She worked as lecturer at various German, Austrian and Swiss universities, at JNU in New Delhi, India, and at Gilan University in Rasht, Iran. Her focus of research is globalization and development political economy and women’s work, women’s movements and international women’s policies, ecology and socio-ecological transformation. Her main academic interest is to deconstruct the global economy as a gendered process with a perspective of feminist economics and feminist ecology and to link up the analysis of discourses, structures and subjectivities. The second core field of interest is the exploration of transnational connectivities in feminisms and feminist movements, in international gender politics and discourses beyond the post-colonial critique.
For many years she worked as a freelance journalist for German print media and radio stations, and was posted as foreign correspondent for Africa in Kenia. Addionally, she worked as consultant to German donor agencies and political foundations, in particular with regard to their gender programmes. Starting with the 3. World Women’s Conference in Nairobi she got involved initially as journalist and then as activist in many international conferences and forums at UN-, WTO- and civil society level. That’s why she considers herself a scholar-activist. Since the 1990s she is an active member of the European feminist network WIDE (Women in Development Europe), presently WIDE+. She worked on a voluntary base in the editorial team of the journals ‘beiträge zur feministischen theorie und praxis’ and ‘Peripherie’. She is a member of the academic council of attac Germany and of the board of the Asiahouse Foundation (Stiftung Asienhaus).