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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesMESH

Dr Carrie B. Dohe

Carrie B. Dohe is currently Research Fellow and Affiliated Researcher at MESH. She has a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago (2012) and has had postdoctoral research positions at the University of Marburg in Germany (2017-2021, funded by the German Research Foundation) and at the University of Toronto School of the Environment (2021-2023).

Her current research concerns Bees for Peace, a project that seeks to engage faith communities for pollinator protection. Originally, Bees for Peace was the leitmotif of an Interreligious Week for Nature Conservation in Cologne, Germany, that Carrie organized in 2018 (and again in 2019). In 2020, Bees for Peace was awarded recognition as an “Official Project of the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity” in Germany, and in 2021, Carrie transferred Bees for Peace to the University of Toronto School of the Environment and Pollinator Partnership Canada. In summer 2023, she partnered with the United Church of Canada to run several Buzzin’ Bees Summer Camps at churches throughout Southern Ontario in July and August 2023. The goal of these camps was to test strategies to encourage children to identify with bees so much that they are deeply moved to protect them. In the next few years, Carrie will expand Bees for Peace across two countries, Germany and Canada, engaging in a cross-cultural, multi-ecoregion, multi-year analysis on pollinator awareness and education.

This project is situated within the transdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, in the sub-fields of Religion and Ecology and Multispecies Studies. The project is also in conversation with Extinction studies, which considers not just the death of individual species, but entire ways and forms of life. As in this sub-field, the proposed project refuses to separate the cultural from the biological and the human from the natural – indeed, the project cannot, for it recognizes that the world in which humans have always lived is a world made possible by the plethora of pollinators and the pollinated. This project uses methods that help individuals recall their fundamental entanglement with other-than-human beings, such as bees and flowers. A gateway to that understanding is these beings’ co-createdness and co-becoming of the world humans have always inhabited. Recognition of these entanglements – from another perspective, this kinship – with other forms of life is the spur for participants to respond with attentiveness and act responsibly towards themselves and the web of relations in which they exist.


Publications:

Book Publication in Progress:

  • Creating and Conserving Common Ground: Religious Environmentalism in Germany. Book manuscript on my DFG Project No. DO 2108/1-2. Contract with Routledge.

Editorship of Special Journal Issue:

  • 2020. Guest editor of Bees and Honey in Religions, special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 14(3). “Special Issue Introduction: Bees and Honey in Religions,” in ibid.: 315-323. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.42365

Articles and Book Chapters:

  • 2023. “‘What does religion have to do with nature conservation?’ Investigating the Tensions in an Interreligious Nature Conservation Project in Germany.” In J. Köhrsen, J. Blanc and F. Huber (eds.), Global Religious Environmental Activism: Emerging Tensions in Earth Stewardship, pp. 176-197. Open Access. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003017967
  • 2023. “Conflicts, Cooperation and Competing Conceptualizations of Religion and Nature Conservation in the German Religions for Biological Diversity Project.” Humanitas Forum (Institute for Liberal Arts and Education, Kyung Hee University, South Korea).
  • 2022. “Schützen die Religionen die Natur zusammen? Wie eine interreligiöse Initiative für biologische Vielfalt in Deutschland Religion und Naturschutz ändert.” (Are Religions Protecting Nature Together? How an Interfaith Initiative for Biological Diversity in Germany is changing Religion and Nature Conservation). In M. Klöcker und U. Tworuschka (eds.), Handbuch der Religionen (Handbook of Religions). Hohenwarsleben: Westarp Science.
  • 2020. “Mobilizing Faith Communities for Bee Preservation: An Analysis of Bees for Peace.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 14(3): 412-438. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.41903

Other publications, both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed:

  • 2017. Book review, Voices from Religions for Sustainable Development, K. Singh and J. Steinau-Clark (eds.), in Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 11(2): 271-273. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.32862

Other peer-reviewed publications:

  • 2016. Jung’s Wandering Archetype: Race and Religion in Analytical Psychology. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315713465
  • 2016. “Analytical Psychology as Modern Revelation: C. G. Jung between Master and Scientist.” In J. Lee-Kalisch and A. Renger (eds.), Meister und Schüler. Master and Disciple. Tradition, Transfer, Transformation. Weimar: VDG, pp. 109-124.
  • 2011. “Wotan and the ‘archetypal Ergriffenheit:’ Mystical Union, National Spiritual Rebirth and Culture-Creating Capacity in C. G. Jung’s ‘Wotan’ Essay.” History of European Ideas 37(3): 344-356. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.12.001