Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ category

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.

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.

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.