Amelie Kutter

Posts tagged ‘[:de]Krise[:en]Crisis[:]’

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).

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.

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’.