Cultures of Rejection. Conditions of Acceptability in Socio-Spatial and Digital Environment (CuRe)
“Cultures of Rejection” project aims to deepen our understandings of social polarization, radicalization, and the transformation of everyday life that underpin recent surges in nationalism and right-wing populism in Europe.
The term "Cultures of Rejection" encompasses 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. Common explanations posit 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: (1) Work environments in retail and logistics, affected by labour transformations, (2) digital environments of social media, and (3) socio-spatial environment such as neighborhoods provide the field sites for CuRe’s research.
At its core, the project asks:
- How are cultures of rejection legitimized or challenged in everyday life?
- To which experiences of change and crisis do workers ascribe meaning via reference to cultures of rejection? meaning with their help?
- Which (socio-technological) environments are relevant to their reproduction?
- What factors can explain 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.
The project is funded by Volkswagen-Stiftung and the team consists of Manuela Bojadžijev (Humboldt-Universität / Germany), Dr. Irena Fiket (University of Belgrade / Serbia), Prof. Dr. Birgit Sauer (University of Vienna / Austria), Dr. Sanja Bojanic (University of Rijeka / Croatia) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Jonsson (Linköping University / Sweden).
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