Posts from the ‘Publications’ category

Below, a selection of my publications is listed. For more see the sub-categories Books, Journal Articles, Book Sections, Working Papers in the menu, or browse the tags in the sidebar of the website.

Kutter, A. (with C. Barnickel and E. Dück) (2024) Discourses of Covid-19 and the Political. Introduction to the CADAAD Special Issue

The contributions in this special issue explore the intersection of discourse, crises and the political during the Covid-19 pandemic. By focusing on ‘the political’, the contributors go beyond understandings of ‘politics’ as procedures and processes of decision-making. Instead, they explore the nuanced ways in which pandemic discourses shape struggles over the normalised socio-political order and its legitimate subjects.

Kutter, A., Barnickel, C., & Dück, E. (2022). Editorial. Covid-19 and the reconfiguration of the political

This editorial introduces to the collection of blog posts on discourses of Covid-19 that were published in the first special issue of the Crisis Discourse Blog. The authors of the blog posts explore the repercussions the pandemic has had on ‘the political’, on what constitutes our political struggle and political identities in the pandemic era. They observe that Covid-19 has left a legacy in the ways in which we communicate, do and imagine politics.

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.

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.

Kutter, A. (2020) Legitimation in the European Union: a discourse- and field-theoretical view

This book investigates how political authority and legitimacy is constructed in the postnational setting of the European Union. Drawing on the example of the EU constitutional debate, and the use of ‘EU constitutional speak’ in Polish and French broadsheets, more particularly, the book shows how claims for legitimacy transform while being transposed from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation to that of national media.

Kutter, A. (2015) A model to the world? CFSP/CSDP and constructions of the EU polity in Poland and France

After the end of the Cold-War, the EU started advancing its Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP/CSDP), making them part of reform that eventually led to the Lisbon Treaty. The article argues that this endeavour was above all a project of polity-construction: it endowed European integration with new purpose, imagining the EU as a polity that legitimately asserted itself globally as a civilising power.