Horkheimer Fellowship

Elisa Greco

Green Grabs in Africa: a Class-Theoretical Perspective

This research foregrounds the importance of reinserting class into the analytical framework on green grabs – a term referring to the increase of land enclosure in the Global South which has been driven by environmental policies. While urgent throughout the Global South, this issue is often neglected in North-based environmental debates. The most recent literature highlights activists’ claims that green grabs are a product of ecological imperialism and neocolonialism, which is a primary contradiction in global environmental policies. Within this debate, the proposal is that to overcome this contradiction and propose a radical alternative the category of class must be put centre-stage. This theoretical development – bridging critical agrarian studies and environmental social sciences - proposes class as a theoretical perspective, reinterpreting Marx’s class analysis towards a relational understanding that foregrounds class as the political potential of unity of the majority. Critically engaging with identity politics and degrowth thinking, Issa Shivji’s concept of the working people is put to the test of global realities of uneven and combined development, by looking at increasing social inequality and the related class politics that are apparent through the North-South divide. The objective of this research stay at the IfS is to publish an article that develops class as an analytical and political tool that bridges the neocolonial divide, responding to the division and fragmentation of current environmental and agrarian movements.

Elisa Greco's profile.

Marcel Stoetzler

The concept of racialization and the dichotomy of antisemitism and racism

The project concerns the relationship of the concepts of »racism« and »antisemitism«. Antisemitism can be argued to be »a form of racism« (as had been common in most of the classic studies of racism) without thereby subsuming (and trivializing) it as »a particular« under racism as »the universal« as long as »race« is understood in an anti-essentialist (or anti-realist) manner as the societal process of »racialization« (as anti-racist scholars first proposed in the 1980s). Bringing the critique of antisemitism back into the study and critique of racism requires recuperating a broader understanding of racism as a social form that neither exclusively focuses on colour codes and the colonial context of their emergence nor is blind to its populist, seemingly anti-hegemonic or »anti-elite« forms.

Marcel Stoetzler's profile.

Funded by the Otto Brenner Stiftung.

Bruna della Torre

The New Organization. Digital Culture Industry, Social Networks, and Right-Wing Propaganda in Brazil

The project reframes Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of culture industry and the Frankfurt School’s studies of propaganda (as well as its contemporary successors) to analyze how the digital apparatus of social media impacts democracies in the Global South, with a particular focus on the recent Brazilian experiment. The objective is to investigate the relationship between the rise of right-wing extremism and the »Digital Culture Industry«. Within this scope, the idea proposed in this project is to expand the analysis of this propaganda concerning specific themes refined by theoretical and virtual ethnographic research so far. This implicates investigating the agitation that circulates mainly on social networks related to the defense of freedom (of speech and to carry weapons), anti-feminism and the so-called »Gender Ideology«, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the mobilization of apocalypticism. The goal of this research stay at the IfS is to write a book project inspired by the studies carried out in the 1940s by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman entitled Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1948), in which the techniques of anti-democratic propaganda and its contents are thoroughly analyzed.

Bruna della Torre's profile.

Funded by the Otto Brenner Stiftung.