Amelie Kutter

    Multiple Krise und Diskursive Politikstudien

    Konferenzpapier, präsentiert auf dem DVPW Kongress, Universität Göttingen, 24-27. 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.

    Forschungsnetzwerk: Peripheralitäten

    Das aus dem Marie-Curie-Projekt ‚Reconfigurations‘ hervorgegangene Netzwerk ‚Peripheralities‘ verbindet Forschende, die sich mich Peripherien, Peripherisierung und Peripheralität transdisziplinär auseinandersetzen. Sie führen konzeptionelle und analytische Perspektiven auf ‚Peripherien‘ aus der Soziologie, der Humangeografie, den Diskursstudien, den postkolonialen Studien, der politischen Ökonomie und der Wirtschaftsgeschichte zusammen.

    Exkursion nach Straßburg: das Europäische Parlament 2024
    ValEUs. Jean Monnet Netzwerk für Forschung und Lehre zur Umstrittenheit der EU-Außenpolitik
    ValEUs workshop ‚Critical Perspectives on European Values‘, University Paris-8, 20-21 June, 2024
    Covid Hydra © Amelie Kutter 20. Juli, 2022, 13-14h CET: Vorstellung des Krisen-Diskurs-Blogs und der Corona-Sonderausgabe am IFES auf Zoom

    Projekt: Der Blog Krise & Diskurs

    Der Blog Krise & Diskurs ist eine Plattform für Zeitgenoss*innen und Diskursforschende, die aktuelle Krisendiskurse entwirren wollen. Ziel ist es, aufzudecken, wie wiederkehrender Sprachgebrauch und Diskursformationen dazu beitragen, Hierarchien in der Gesellschaft zu verfestigen oder aber neue Möglichkeiten kollektiven Handels zu erschließen. Forschende, Studierende, und aufmerksame Zeitgenoss*innen nutzen diese Plattform, um frische Einsichten aus laufenden Forschungsprojekten oder Reflektionen zu aktuellen Entwicklungen in kurzer Form und greifbarer Sprache zu veröffentlichen. Einige thematische Ausgaben sind in Vorbereitung, Aufrufe zu neuen Beiträgen folgen in Kürze.

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

    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.

    ECPR 2020 General Conference: Advancing field analysis in European integration studies

    Contributions in this panel consider how field analysis can be advanced as a research programme in European integration studies. Panellists include Didier Bigo (Sciences Po Paris), Niilo Kauppi (University of Helsinki), discussant), Amelie Kutter (European University Viadrina, chair), Tomas Martilla (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg (University of Potsdam, co-chair).

    Peripheriality: authors‘ workshop

    The past decades have brought an increase in spatially connoted disparities and inequalities both within and between European societies, intertwined with changes within the European Union (EU) and the global constellation. The workshop ‘Peripheriality: constructing socio-spatial hierarchies within and beyond Europe’ invites contributions that focus on the construction of centrality and peripheriality or of central and peripheral Selves in discourses and (material) practices.

    Exkursion nach Straßburg: das Europäische Parlament 2024

    Anlässlich der Europa-Wahl 2024 reisten Studierende des MA European Studies an der Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), vom 14. bis zum 17. Juli 2024 nach Straßburg, zu den konstituierenden Plenarsitzungen des neu gewählten Europäischen Parlaments. Hier teilen die Exkursionsteilnehmenden ihre Einblicke.

    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).