Posts from the ‘Aktivitäten’ category

Hier wird eine Auswahl meiner Aktivitäten angezeigt. Mehr finden Sie in den Sub-Kategorien Veranstaltungen und Vorträge oder über die Schlagworte in der Side-Bar der Website.

Keynote: When the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Multiple crisis and transformation in Central and Southeastern Europe

Current talk of ‘crisis’ suggests that we are living through an era, in which crisis has become permanent and exceptional politics the new norm (Agamben 2005). In that setting, prospects for individual and social development seem to narrow down to becoming more ‘resilient’ through adaptation. This keynote argues that this reading of permanent crisis and exceptionalism, while plausibly structuring our current perceptions, is not particularly helpful to grasp what is going on in Central, Southern and Southeastern Europe. I suggest that we need more specified notions of crisis and transformation. I will lay out some conceptual stepping stones for the conference’s further elaborations, sketching a genealogy of crisis thought and distinguishing between transformation as directed system change (Kollmorgen 2010) and ‘Great transformations’ in Polanyi’s sense (Polanyi 1944). Drawing on selected crisis periods in Spain and Poland for illustration, I will show how a Polanyian reading, combined with Gramsci’s idea of organic crisis, can illuminate the current conundrum between crisis, transformation and populism.

Windrad-Gondel im Hof des Neue Energien Forum Feldheim

Seminarserie: Wie geht nachhaltige Transformation?

Seit einigen Jahren richtet die Europäische Union ihre Investitions- und Kohäsionspolitik verstärkt an Nachhaltigkeitszielen aus. Auch die Bundesregierung und die Brandenburgische Landesregierung forcieren Klimaneutralität. Wie aber gestaltet sich nachhaltige Transformation lokal und welche Relevanz haben diese Nachhaltigkeitspolitiken aus einer bottom-up Perspektive? Das thematisiert die Seminarserie ‚Wie geht klimaneutrale Transformation? Europäische Nachhaltigkeitspolitik und lokale Change-Maker in Brandenburg‘, die Amelie Kutter konzipiert hat und an der Viadrina durchführt.

Vortrag: Krise und Politisierung. Das Beispiel der Corona-Pandemie

Vortrag von Amelie Kutter auf dem JURE-Workshop ‚Policitisations of pandemic recovery‘, 16 June, 2023, University of Helsinki. Unlike during earlier crises, the distributive effects of crisis and crisis management have not been subject of political constestation during the pandemic. What has primarily been contested is the legitimacy of national biopolitics, that is, the way by which public authorities seek to control for the health of a population in a given territory. The paper argues that the emphasis on self-determination vis-à-vis state authorities and the backgrounding of distributive effects of crisis management is related to the way the pandemic was constructed as a crisis in the first place and the specific type of political subjectivity – the responsible and resilient subject – that containment and recovery measures interpellated. This argument is drawn from discursive political studies, and a discourse conception of politicisation more specifically, which highlights the construction of political agency, opponency and voice previously unaccounted for in political competition (Kutter 2020).

Polity-Construction or How the European Union is (De-)Legitimised: A Discursive Political Sociology Perspective

The paper, presented at the 28th Council for European Studies conference in Lisbon/ISCE on 29 July, 2022, introduces a ‘discursive political sociology perspective’ that combines the theory of meaning-constitution developed in linguistically informed discourse studies with Bour-dieusian political sociology and the political theory of polity-building. It shifts attention from outcome (legitimacy) to process (legitimation) and from identification with existing EU institutions to discourse practices that only establish the means of communicating and cognizing EU politics in its potential and postnational character.

Krisen und Krisennarrative in Südwesteuropa. Workshop für Teilnehmende des Regionaltreffens der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes

In den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten haben die Gesellschaften Frankreichs, Italiens, Portugals und Spaniens umfassende Krisen durchlaufen. Die Corona-Pandemie markiert einen Wendepunkt im Krisenmanagement auf nationaler und europäischer Ebene: anstelle von Sparprogrammen legen Regierungen und die Europäische Union Investitionsprogramme auf, die auf soziale Absicherung, Wirtschaftssubventionen und Infrastrukturmodernisierung abzielen. Der Workshop ‚Krisen und Krisennarrative in Südwesteuropa‘ erkundet Gründe für diesen Politikwechsel. Er legt besonderes Augenmerk auf die Rolle von Krisennarrativen bei der Formulierung von Politiken des Krisenmanagements.