Amelie Kutter

Posts from the ‘Vorträge’ category

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.

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.

Übungen in Komplexität und Kontingenz von Politikentscheidung: das Ordentliche Gesetzgebungsverfahren der EU als digitales Planspiel

EU-Gesetzgebung ist schon häufig zum Gegenstand von Planspielen gemacht worden. Zumeist wird darin jedoch nur der Part des Europäischen Parlaments oder des Rats der EU abgebildet, die Verfahren werden außerdem stark stilisiert und Auseinandersetzungen auf ideologische oder interstaatliche Konflikte reduziert. Während diese Planspiele ein stringentes Spielerlebnis ermöglichen, verfestigen sie gleichzeitig die vereinfachte mediale Darstellung von EU Politik. Dieser Beitrag, präsentiert von Amelie Kutter auf dem DVWP Kongress 2021, reflektiert Erfahrungen mit einem Planspiel zur ersten Lesung des von der EU Kommission 2019 vorgeschlagenen „Neuen Pakts für Asyl und Migration“, das in zwei aufeinanderfolgenden Semestern in der Einführungsvorlesung ‚Introduction to the politics of the European Union‘ im interdisziplinären und internationalisierten Masterstudiengang Europa-Studien an der Europa-Universität Viadrina über Zoom durchgeführt wurde. Ziel war weniger, politikwissenschaftliches Spezialwissen zu vermitteln als Studierende dazu zu befähigen, die Komplexität und Kontingenz von laufenden EU-Verhandlungen zur durchdringen.

The Discourse Field of EU Multilateral Negotiation: Articulating Field and Discourse Theory

This paper argues that field analyses of EU politics can benefit from an articulation of field theory with discourse theories that are situated in the pragmatic turn in linguistics. By focussing on the discursive constitution of field-specific cultural capital, we can grasp the selectivity of EU-related structured interaction that emerges ad hoc among professional tribes of the EU, notably when these collaborate outside established routines and fields and become entangled in a grand moment of EU institution-building.

Mobilising for alternatives to EU austerity: SYRIZA’s narrative of the European financial and economic crisis

Vortrag von Amelie Kutter und Gesine Lenkewitz auf der 7. CADAAD Konferenz
The Eurozone crisis brought about a new form of party political opposition in Europe that is deeply critical of the current institutional setting of the EU and the EU’s approach to crisis management while, at the same time, generally supporting the European project. This paper investigates discourse practices employed by such ‘euroalternativist opposition’ (Fitzgibbon 2013), drawing on the example of statements (press releases, speeches and interviews) on EU crisis management addressed to international audiences by SYRIZA between the years 2009-2014.

Analysing crisis discourses: theories and strategies

Vortrag von Amelie Kutter auf der 7. CADAAD Konferenz
Since the financial crisis emerged in 2007, many projects and publications have been launched that discourse-analyse representations of crisis and crisis management in communications by various groups and organisations. This research has generated insights in recurrent features of crisis discourse, such as blame games, claims for extraordinary authority, or trends of normalisation. Crisis itself, however, is usually taken for granted and rarely subjected to theoretical consideration. The present paper suggests that theories of crisis that borrow from Marxist thought help to gain an understanding of crisis as a catalyst of social change and to conceptually focus analyses of crisis and its discursive construction.