Amelie Kutter

    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.

    Research network ‘Peripheralities’

    The research network ‘Peripheralities’ that has grown out of the Marie-Curie project ‘Reconfigurations’ brings together researchers that investigate peripheries, peripherisation and peripheral subjectivities in a transdisciplinary fashion. Participants combine conceptual and analytical perspectives on peripheries from sociology, human geography, discourse studies, postcolonial studies, political economy and economic history.

    Study trip to Strasbourg: the European Parliament 2024
    ValEUs. Jean Monnet Research & Education Network on Contestations to EU Foreign Policy
    ValEUs workshop ‘Critical Perspectives on European Values’, University Paris-8, 20-21 June, 2024
    Covid Hydra © Amelie Kutter 20 July, 2022, 1-2pm UTC+1: Presentation of the Crisis Discourse Blog and its Covid-19 special edition at IFES via Zoom

    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.

    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.

    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.

    ValEUs. Jean Monnet Research & Education Network on Contestations to EU Foreign Policy

    The project, titled “ValEUs. Research & Education Network on Contestations to EU Foreign Policy,” has secured 1.2 million euros in funding from the EU Commission as part of a Jean Monnet Policy Network (JMPN) for a three-year period starting from January 2024. This ambitious venture, involving 20 partner institutions from 17 countries across five continents, focuses on scrutinizing the foreign policy of the European Union and the challenges posed to its values.

    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.

    Talk: Crisis and politicisation. The example of the Covid-19 pandemic

    Talk by Amelie Kutter at the 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).