Amelie Kutter

Posts by Amelie Kutter

Crisis and crisis narratives in Southwest Europe. Workshop for participants of the regional meeting of Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes

In the past decade, societies in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain have gone through mutiple crisis. The recent pandemic further aggravates calamities that were already visible during the financial and Eurozone crisis: social inequalities, dysfunctions in national systems of social security and health provision, political instability and non-sustainable economies. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic markes a shift in policies of crisis management: on both national and European levels, policy-makers have departed from austerity and agreed on stimulus programmes, instead. This workshop explores reasons for this policy shift and the role, crisis narratives play in making that shift more or less possible.

Kutter & Masson (2022) ‘Researching institutions after the discursive turn’

Dieses Kapitel erscheint im von Uwe Flick herausgegebenen SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Design. Es erkundet, welchen Beitrag qualitative Sozialforschung zur Analyse von sozialen und politischen Institutionen machen kann. Wir zeigen, dass Institutionenforschung von einer Kombination von Diskursanalyse mit Foucault’s Gouvernementalitätsstudien und mit Bourdieu’s Feldanalyse profitieren kann. Zunächst führen wir in Themen und intellektuelle Traditionen der Institutionenforschung ein, um den Lesenden die Navigation im Forschungsfeld zu erleichtern. Mit Rückgriff auf das Beispiel der Gouvernmentalität der EU-Agrarpolitik und das Beispiel des Diskursfelds der multilateralen Verhandlung in der EU führen wir dann aus, wie qualitative Forschung in Institutionen nach der diskursiven Wende projektiert, umgesetzt und reflektiert werden kann.

Exercise in complexity and contingency: the example of the MES-Viadrina snap-shot simulation of EU legislation on asylum and migration

This paper, presented by Amelie Kutter at the DVPW Congress 2021, suggests that a neglected, but promising, potential of EU simulations is their function as exercises in complexity and contingency. If designed appropriately, simulation games not only reveal the complexity and contingency of EU politics (cognitive learning), but also the complexity and contingency of thinking about EU politics (cognitive-reflexive learning). Drawing on the example of a snap-shot simulation of the first reading of the EU’s New Pact on Asylum and Migration that was carried out as part of the lecture class ‘Introduction to the politics of the European Union’ at the MA European Studies unit of European University Viadrina, I will show such learning objective can be fostered in simulation game design.

Authors’ workshop on the special issue ‘Covid crisis discourse’ of the Crisis Discourse Blog

This call invites blog posts that investigate phenomena of recent crisis debate from a discourse-analytical angle. The call addresses discourse scholars and students of discourse studies, who currently research discourses of the Covid-19 pandemic and related aspects of multiple crisis and who specialise in a specific discourse approach. We invite researchers to share initial or consolidated insights of their ongoing work with the specialist community and the wider audience, preparing blog posts for the Crisis Discourse Blog.

Expert panel: Boundaries of social citizenship in EUrope

Recent crises have revealed that access to social rights, such as social security, short time work, housing, or health care is essential for the resilience of economies to external shocks, but also for sustaining social cohesion, trust and belonging in European societies. Prof. Dr. Dagmar Schiek (University College Cork); Dr. Alexandre de le Court (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona); Dr. Norbert Cyrus (Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION) and Dr. Amelie Kutter discuss problems of transnational social citizenship highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, in the frames of the Research Factory B/ORDERS IN MOTION on 8 Dec, 2020.

Project: The Crisis & Discourse Blog

The crisis & discourse blog is a platform for people interested in disentangling and reflecting upon forms of language use that emerge or reinforce in times of crisis. The major concern is to reveal how recurrent forms of language use and crisis discourse contribute to the entrenchment of social hierarchies or open up prospects for collective action. Researchers and students have already worked on contributions that will be published successively in thematic issues. Calls for further contributions will follow soon.

Kutter, A. (2020) Construction of the Eurozone crisis: re- and depoliticising European economic integration

(Deutsch) The Eurozone crisis is among recent developments that upset the European Union (EU) most profoundly and sparked unprecedented contestation. This article adopts a discursive notion of politicisation and the frame of Discursive Political Studies to investigate whether that moment of contestation re-politicised EU economic governance in substantive terms. It argues that, while emerging counter-narratives of crisis projected alternative scenarios of economic integration and established a practice of constructive EU critique, they were co-opted by the dominant mass-mediated story of a public debt crisis.

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.

Research collaboration: Advancing multiscalar social citizenship in Europe (2020…)

Recent  crises  have  revealed  that  access  to  social  rights, such as social security, short time work, housing, or health care is essential for the resilience of economies to external shocks, but also for sustaining social cohesion, trust and belonging in European societies. This collaborative project investigates the limits and potentials of transnational social citizenship in Europe. The objective is to map sources of social citizenship that have established at the EU’s different scales in law, policy, regulation, social work, and perceptions and discourses of social citizenship, and that might form part of a set of rights enforcible not only for EU migrants, but for those marginalised within their societies, too.