Amelie Kutter

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.

The Discourse Field of EU Multilateral Negotiation: Articulating Field and Discourse Theory

This paper argues that field analyses of EU politics can benefit from an articulation of field theory with discourse theories that are situated in the pragmatic turn in linguistics. By focussing on the discursive constitution of field-specific cultural capital, we can grasp the selectivity of EU-related structured interaction that emerges ad hoc among professional tribes of the EU, notably when these collaborate outside established routines and fields and become entangled in a grand moment of EU institution-building.

Research collaboration: Advancing multiscalar social citizenship in Europe (2020…)

Recent  crises  have  revealed  that  access  to  social  rights, such as social security, short time work, housing, or health care is essential for the resilience of economies to external shocks, but also for sustaining social cohesion, trust and belonging in European societies. This collaborative project investigates the limits and potentials of transnational social citizenship in Europe. The objective is to map sources of social citizenship that have established at the EU’s different scales in law, policy, regulation, social work, and perceptions and discourses of social citizenship, and that might form part of a set of rights enforcible not only for EU migrants, but for those marginalised within their societies, too.

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.

Mobilising for alternatives to EU austerity: SYRIZA’s narrative of the European financial and economic crisis

Talk given by Amelie Kutter and Gesine Lenkewitz at the 7th CADAAD conference
The Eurozone crisis brought about a new form of party political opposition in Europe that is deeply critical of the current institutional setting of the EU and the EU’s approach to crisis management while, at the same time, generally supporting the European project. This paper investigates discourse practices employed by such ‘euroalternativist opposition’ (Fitzgibbon 2013), drawing on the example of statements (press releases, speeches and interviews) on EU crisis management addressed to international audiences by SYRIZA between the years 2009-2014.

Analysing crisis discourses: theories and strategies

Talk given by Amelie Kutter at the 7th CADAAD conference
Since the financial crisis emerged in 2007, many projects and publications have been launched that discourse-analyse representations of crisis and crisis management in communications by various groups and organisations. This research has generated insights in recurrent features of crisis discourse, such as blame games, claims for extraordinary authority, or trends of normalisation. Crisis itself, however, is usually taken for granted and rarely subjected to theoretical consideration. The present paper suggests that theories of crisis that borrow from Marxist thought help to gain an understanding of crisis as a catalyst of social change and to conceptually focus analyses of crisis and its discursive construction.

The Framing of Crises in Europe

International author workshop organised by Dr Benedetta Voltolini at the Centre d’etudes europeennes, Sciences Po Paris on December 7th-8th, 2017, with a paper by Amelie Kutter on ‘Perpetuating austerity: narratives of the Eurozone crisis’.

Workshop at Erlangen University, with a talk by Amelie Kutter: Texts and Images of Austerity. A Multimodal Multimedia Analysis

Austerity is a complex phenomenon with far reaching consequences for economic wellbeing, social justice and political systems. The workshop will focus on
discursive constructions of austerity in the British media and explore a large corpus of newspaper articles in a collaborative manner. It takes place at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg on Sept. 25th-29th, 2017.