Amelie Kutter

Posts from the ‘Activities’ category

Below, a selection of my activities is listed. For more see the sub-categories Convened Events and Talks, or browse the tags in the sidebar of the website.

Multiple crisis and Discursive Political Studies

Paper presented by Amelie Kutter at the DVPW convention in September 2024. Current diagnoses of crisis often use the term ‘polycrisis’ (Tooze, 2023) to refer to the multiplicity and interdependence of crisis phenomena that seem to characterise contemporary societies. This paper explores the contribution that Discursive Political Studies (DPS, Kutter 2020b) can make to the study of the politics of crisis and, more specifically, polycrisis. Their potential can be exploited by re-considering the different theories of meaning constitution (or: theories of discourse) that they offer. Combined with insights from a review of theories of crisis, they can guide a thorough discourse analysis of crisis.

Study trip to Strasbourg: the European Parliament 2024

On the occasion of the elections to the European Parliament 2024, a group of Viadrina students travelled to Strasbourg to visit the constituting plenary sessions and deepen insights from the project class ‘Which Europe do we vote for? The elections to the European Parliament and the green future of the European Union’ by Amelie Kutter.

The European Parliament and the EU’s green future after the 2024 elections

On the occasion of the elections to the European Parliament in 2024 and polarised positions on climate change, a group of students of the MA European Studies at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), studied European elections, campaigns, the European Green Deal and negotiations on EU climate and biodiversity legislation. They travelled to Strasbourg to watch the constituting sessions of the new European Parliament and work out how European parliamentary politics works on the ground.

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

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.