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Cultures of Rejection: Conditions of Acceptability in Socio-Spatial and Digital Environments in Contemporary Europe [CuRe]

Abstract

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/

Keywords:

Citizenship, Populism, Work, Culture, Crisis

Description

The research project aims towards a comprehensive understanding of in five European countries, investigating local and regional settings in order to better understand challenges and threats to European integration. Specifically, we address four interrelated questions:

How do employees in retail and logistics industries reproduce, justify or contest cultures of rejection in their everyday lives? What collective and individual constructions of “self” and “others” constitute cultures of rejection?
What online and offline environments are relevant to the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of cultures of rejection?
What experiences of routines, transformation, and crisis are meaningful to workers in reference to cultures of rejection? How do employees connect narratives of, for example, migration, economic development or European integration to cultures of rejection?
What similarities and differences in the investigated environments can account for differences and similarities in the composition of cultures of rejection in different spaces and places? Can we detect observable resonances between the case studies?

The research project brings together scholars from five distinguished academic institutions: The Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organisation (ICSO) at the Leuphana University Lüneburg; the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University; the Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe (CAS SEE) at the University of Rijeka; the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) at the University of Belgrade; and the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Manuela Bojadžijev, Prof. Dr. Stefan Jonsson, Prof. Dr. Sanja Bojani?, Prof. Dr. Irena Fiket and Prof. Dr. Birgit Sauer, research is conducted by one Post-Doc Researcher, four PhD students, and five student assistants.

The teams in each country share and develop their research in constant cooperation through online and offline meetings and workshops. Complementing the five research teams, an international board of internationally distinguished experts based in Oxford and Paris assists in the discussion of our results and situating our findings in a wider European context. All CuRe research teams cooperate locally with trade unions, which allows them to gain knowledge about and access to workplace environments. Our cooperating partners include ver.di (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft – United Services Trade Union) in Germany; Handels (Handelsanställdas förbund, Union of Commercial Employees) in Sweden, the Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia (Savez samostalnih Sindikata Hrvatske), UGS Nezavisnost in Serbia, and both GPA-djp (Gewerkschaft´der Privatangestellten, Druck, Journalismus, Papier – Union of Private Employees, Print, Journalism,Paper) and Vida (Verkehrs- und Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft – Union for Transport and Services) in Austria.

Our theoretical framework is situated at the intersection of qualitative social science, anthropology, and cultural and migration studies. The empirical investigation operates at three levels of analysis, each one focusing on specific environments in which cultures of rejection are hypothesized to be produced, reproduced, negotiated, challenged, and/or rejected. Level 1 focuses on workplace environments; level 2 on digital environments; and level 3 on socio-spatial environments.

This approach allows us to go beyond a narrow focus on experiences related to paid labor, and to analyze multiple sites where economic, political, and socio-cultural reproduction occurs.

We study these environments with respect to three dimensions of the reproduction, transformation, and crisis of livelihoods: economic (i.e., debt, multiple jobs, household structures, solidarity structures, DIY-cultures), political (i.e., attitudes towards representation, political engagement), and socio-cultural (i.e., housing, health, consumption, education, friendships and romance, leisure activities, mobility). The aim is to understand the degree to which and in what ways respondents fear or feel ownership over their futures. In order to understand cultures of rejection in their complexity, we deploy an analytical matrix that investigates experiences of everyday routines (or “reproduction”), change (or “transformation”), and rupture (or “crisis”) in the spheres of economic, political, and socio-cultural life.

Our methodology includes surveys; semi-structured, qualitative interviews;, focus-group discussions; discourse-centered online ethnographies; and ethnographic field research (including participatory observation, field notes, informal conversations, and on-site interviews, as well as document analyses and expert interviews).

Our research strategy draws on qualitative social research and cultural analysis to better understand the ways in which people make sense of a changing world in terms of (elements of) cultures of rejection. Studying cultures of rejection thus amounts to the examination of sociocultural tactics, or what de Certeau called the “arts of doing” that people adopt in their “practice of everyday life”.

Publications

CuRe Research Team (2021) Cultures of rejection in the Covid-19 crisis. Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Bojanic, Sanja (2019) Retorica dell’emancipazione vs. retorica della misoginia. Pensare la violenza con Judith Butler. Aut aut, 384 (2019), 43-57.

Bojadžijev, Manuela (2019) Die Logistik der Migration. Ethnographische und epistemische Perspektiven. In: Johler, R. und Lange, J. (Hg.): Konfliktfeld Flucht Migration. Historische und ethnographische Perspektiven“. Münster: Transkript.

Jonsson, Stefan (2020) A society which is not: Political emergence and migrant agency. Current Sociology, 68 (2), 204–222.

Opratko, Benjamin (2019) Devils from our past: liberal Islamophobia in Austria as historicist racism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 42(16), 159-176.

Sauer, Birgit and Birte Siim (2019) Inclusive Political Intersections of Migration, Race, Gender and Sexuality – The Cases of Austria and Denmark. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Gazela Pudar Draško and Petar Bojani? (2019) Che cos’è la polizia? L’istituzione della violenza universale e la violenza dell’universale, Aut Aut, 94–112.

Neergaard, Anders & Dahlstedt, Magnus (2019) Crisis of Solidarity? Changing Welfare and Migration Regimes in Sweden. Critical Sociology, 45(1), 121–135.

Opratko, Benjamin (2020) Die Kultur der Ablehnung. Tagebuch, 16-18.

Other Academic Output

Cultures of Rejection in the COVID-19 Crisis
13.01.2021, Online
Join us in an online discussion with Eva von Redecker, Richard Seymour, Manuela Bojadžijev, Stefan Jonsson and Birgit Sauer. The event will take place on January 13, 2021, 6:00 - 7:45 pm (CET). To register, please send an email to anna.hasenauer@univie.ac.at


Kritische Gesellschaftsforschung zwischen Utopie und Dystopie
05.03.2020 - 07.03.2020, Kassel
In den letzten zehn Jahren entfaltete sich weltweit ein neuer Zyklus autoritärer, antidemokratischer, neoliberaler, rechtskonservativ bis völkisch orientierter gesellschaftlicher Dynamik. Umso bewusster wird, dass die Erfolge emanzipatorischer Kämpfe der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart oftmals fragiler sind als angenommen.

Social Polarization and the rise of Cultures of Rejection across Europe
03.03.2020, Campus Norrköping
Welcome to a panel discussion on the ways we live, work, fear, hate and dream in contemporary Europe – with some of the foremost thinkers in the area of right-wing politics, populism, nationalism and racism. In the Documentation you can find the video of the Panel discussion.

2019 - 2023

Funding

Linköpings universitet
Volkswagen-Stiftung

REMESO Project Leader

Stefan Jonsson, Professor

Participants from REMESO

Anders Neergaard
Celina Ortega Soto
Tanja Matilainen

Participants not from REMESO

  • Alexander Harder, Lüneburg University, Germany
  • Anna Hasenauer, University of Vienna, Austria
  • Benjamin Opratko,
  • Birgit Sauer, University of Vienna, Austria
  • Florian Zeller, University of Vienna, Austria
  • Gazela Pudar Drasko, University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Irena Fiket, University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Kristina Stojanovic, University of Rijeka, Croatia
  • Manuela Bojadžijev, Lüneburg University and Humboldt University, Germany
  • Mirjana Ne?ak, University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Sanja Bojanic, University of Rijeka, Croatia
  • Sara Nikolic, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Contact for project

stefan.jonsson@liu.se


Last updated: 2021-02-03



Page responsible: erik.berggren@liu.se
Last updated: 2020-05-27