Amelie Kutter

Posts tagged ‘Austerity’

Crisis and crisis narratives in Southwest Europe. Workshop for participants of the regional meeting of Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes

In the past decade, societies in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain have gone through mutiple crisis. The recent pandemic further aggravates calamities that were already visible during the financial and Eurozone crisis: social inequalities, dysfunctions in national systems of social security and health provision, political instability and non-sustainable economies. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic markes a shift in policies of crisis management: on both national and European levels, policy-makers have departed from austerity and agreed on stimulus programmes, instead. This workshop explores reasons for this policy shift and the role, crisis narratives play in making that shift more or less possible.

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.