Johanna Leinius

Johanna Leinius, Dr. phil., works as the scientific manager of the CGC since May 2022. Her research interests are postcolonial-feminist theory, Latin American women’s and feminist movements, political ontology, and gender relations in the socio-ecological transformation and the polycrisis.  

She is the spokesperson of the working group 'Poststructuralist Perspectives on Social Movements' at the Institute for Protest and Movement Research (ipb) and a member of the Politics and Gender section (in the speakers' council 2016-2021) of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). She is a board member of the Association for the Promotion of Feminist Political Science as well as a member of the German Sociological Association (DGS), the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS), and the CLACSO working group 'Bodies, Territories and Feminisms.' Since 2025, she has been a member of the DFG network “Poststructuralist Protest and Movement Research: A Multiperspective Analytical Approach (POPMAP).” 

Johanna Leinius studied International Political Management at Hochschule Bremen and ‘Ethnic Relations, Cultural Diversity and Integration’ at the University of Helsinki. She worked as a researcher at the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence 'The Formation of Normative Orders,' Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, before moving to the graduate program ‘Ecologies of Social Cohesion: Heterogeneity and Hybridity in Synchronous and Diachronic Comparison,’ Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Kassel. Most recently, she was employed at the Chair of Sociological Theory, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kassel.

In her dissertation, with which she earned her doctorate in 2017 at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, she researched in cooperation with the Programa Democracia y Transformación Global, Peru, how differences were constructed and solidary practices enabled at two inter-movement meetings in Peru. The work was awarded the 2018 prize for the best dissertation by the International Association of Inter-American Studies and published in 2022 as "The Cosmopolitics of Solidarity – Social Movement Encounters Across Difference" (Springer Nature). She is currently doing research on the discourses and practices of defending body, territory, and life in protest and resistance movements against extractive projects in Latin America and Germany as well as on authoritarian gender politics.

She is active in academic self-administration, among other things as the women’s and equal opportunities officer of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Kassel (2019-2022), member of the Equal Opportunities Commission of the University of Kassel (2021-2022), representative of the mid-level faculty in the Senate of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2015-2017), member of the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2013-2015), and founding member as well as spokesperson of the Gender Studies Network Hesse (since 2024).