Projects with keyword: Populism

During the last 20 years their has been an upsurge in research on xenophobic populist parties mirroring their political successes. However, these studies have rarely touched upon the role of women and immigrants within these parties. While women are often invisible in research, located in a marginal role as girl-friends and sisters, migrants support to these parties is often defined as a contradiction in terms and remains un-theorised. The aim of the study is to analyse the double edged relationship between on the one side women and migrants approaching the Swedish xenophic populist party -Sweden Democrats, and on the other side the discourse of the party in respect to women and migrants in their conditions of representatives. It will identify women's and migrant's agency and explore the ways through which these shape, constrain and influence their position in the organisation. Theoretically the project is framed within gender and IMER studies, focusing on the notions of the family and nationhood, and the notions of ethnic belonging and nationhood. Methodologically the study is based on in depth interviews and life-stories with women and migrants representing SD in municipalities.

This project analyzes the idea and image of the masses in modern European history. To write the history of the masses is at once to write the history of the political, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries that have been fabricated in order for a certain people, nation, or ethnicity to view itself as a unity, and this by rejecting certain segments of the population as "masses". The problem at the heart of this research undertaking is thus central to the ways in which cultural and collective identities have been construed throughout European modernity. The project is completed and has resulted in two major monographs and a number of articles; the first one is "A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions", published in Swedish in 2005, and in English in 2008; the second one is entitled "Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses in Europe between the Wars", and is (2011) forthcoming.

The project examines art, literature and film dealing with collective protests in 2011 and after. It will explore how aesthetic presentations advance our understanding of collective political action in ways that other modes of knowledge such as sociology, history and journalism are unable to do.

The material is a selection of literary and artistic works that present or perform the Tahrir revolution in Cairo 2011, the People's Assemblies in Athens 2011, and the Maidan Revolt in Kiev 2013-2014. The project focuses on the dialogical and multivocal modes of experience at the heart collective protest.

CuRe gathers five research teams from Austria, Croatia, Germany, Serbia and Sweden. Its goal is to understand the recshift in everyday life towards polarization and radicalization, and the successes of right-wing movements and parties in Europe. We start from the premise that cultures of rejection emerge as the result of crises in Europe’s democracies, as well as due to changes in national institutions and civil society. Since rejection is a threat to all forms of social cohesion and peaceful coexistence, the project seeks to study the conditions that have led to the rejection of, among else, immigration, political elites, media and cultural values such as gender equality and sexual liberty.

Specifically, the research focuses on the way economic and technological changes impact employees in logistics and sales, and in which way employees ascribe any particular meaning to these changes.

The researchers assess the situation along the 2015 migration route across Sweden, Germany, Austria, Croatia and Serbia, thoroughly examining work places, digital and socio-spatial environments in interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.

Project web page: http://www.culturesofrejection.net/

This project suggests a new research concept. It assumes that aesthetic expressions offer unique methods for inquiring into political emergence. Aesthetic works own this potentiality because they register sociopolitical transformation through voice, embodied experience and subjective expression, comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant, in situations of antagonism and political violence.

– How are collective protests, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism – and their mutualtensions and interdependencies – articulated in contemporary aesthetic presentations and performances?
– In comparison to disciplinary research in the social sciences, what do such aesthetically rendered accounts tell us about the political emergence of collective protest, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism?
– In which ways can the aesthetic dimension improve our understanding of the concept and practices of democracy, in an era of social rearrangement and computational control of collective behavior?

The project engages aesthetics to traverse epistemological boundaries and enables methodological convergences between the social sciences and the aesthetic humanities.

Gender and sexuality matter in politics. The term Anti-genderism identifies a deep societal conflict in the challenge and resistance to the global expansion of women´s and sexual minorities’ rights, and the
democratization of the family. It highlights political and cultural agendas demanding re-patriarchalisation and retraditionalisation of both families, individuals, and societies. The research team has crafted a novel interdisciplinary and comparative program, bringing together a solid conceptual frame on the nexus gender, sexuality and family, through a multi-sited ethnography, towards a systematic exploration of a fundamental paradox: the centrality of gender equality in the Nordic region and the successful establishment of antigenderism coalitions at the core of the Nordic countries. The aim of the research program will be to analyze antigenderism as ideas, collective identities, communities of belonging and political projects in the Nordic region (here defined as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) focusing on civil society organizations and networks, mainstream political parties and religious institutions.

Connecting artistic research and practice to aesthetics, sociology and computational modeling and visualization, this project asks: What is a crowd in the 21st century? We explore how collective protests, migration and authoritarian populism shape today's politics while also being modelled by digital infrastructures and automated systems.
Aims:

To understand the impact on democracy of collective protest, authoritarianism, migration and computational modeling.

To investigate how collective behavior generated by digital technologies align crowd behavior with political programs and market strategies that defy democratic values.

To investigate how embodied subjective agency and collective assembly interrupts such processes of collective automation.

To show the ability of artistic research to spark conceptual development, innovative methodologies and theoretical insights into the relation of aesthetic expression and democracy.

The project assembles photography, film, digital aesthetics, literary essay, choreography. It will organize workshops, performances and theoretical debates. Output is a collaborative film essay, a literary essay and anthology, and exhibition.