Projekt

The project aims at generating a deeper understanding of processes of social polarization, radicalization, and transformation of everyday life that underpin recent surges in nationalism and right-wing populism in Europe. These processes are termed "cultures of rejection": Practices, discourses, and cultural formations based on values, norms, and affects which reject immigration, domestic political elites, institutions of civil society and the media, shifting gender relations, and European integration. The working hypothesis posits that cultures of rejection emerge from experiences of change and crisis, and fuel rejection of both the EU and national democratic systems as well as institutions of civil society, threatening social cohesion and peaceful coexistence. The project seeks to test this hypothesis and to analyze which dimensions of transformation and crisis are processed in cultures of rejection, and how meaning is ascribed to them intersubjectively in different environments. At its core, the project asks: (1) how do workers in two industries affected by economic and technological transformation (logistics/transport and retail) reproduce, justify, or contradict cultures of rejection in their everyday lives? (2) To which experiences of routines, transformation, and crisis do employees ascribe meaning via reference to cultures of rejection? (3) Which online and offline environments are relevant to their reproduction? (4) What similarities and differences can account for the composition of cultures of rejection in different spaces and places? Such cultures are investigated empirically across a transnational European space in Sweden, Germany, Austria, Croatia, and Serbia, and on three levels: The workplace, digital environments, and social-spatial environments innovatively combining social and cultural research with ethnological methods in both online and offline environments.

• Prof. Dr. Manuela Bojadzijev

  Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
  Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften
  Institut für Soziologie und Kulturorganisation
  Lüneburg
  

• Dr. Irena Fiket

  University of Belgrade
  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory
  Belgrade
  Serbien
  

• Prof. Dr. Birgit Sauer

  Universität Wien
  Institut für Politikwissenschaft
  Wien
  Österreich
  

• Dr. Sanja Bojanic

  University of Rijeka
  Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe
  Rijeka
  Kroatien
  

• Prof. Dr. Stefan Jonsson

  Linköping University
  Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  Department of Social and Welfare Studies
  Norrköping
  Schweden
  

• "A society which is not: Political emergence and migrant agency