Horkheimer Fellowship

Ana Santamarina

The Far Right’s Politicization of the Housing Crisis and Antifascist Horizons (RIGHTS-HOUSING)

The project examines the politicisation of the housing crisis by far-right actors in contemporary Europe, focusing on how material conditions of housing precarity are translated into exclusionary narratives around migration, welfare and belonging. It starts from the premise that, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent intensification of housing financialisation, housing has become a central site for capital reproduction, and therefore a key terrain through which the current political conjuncture is lived, interpreted and contested. Across Europe and beyond, the deepening housing crisis has become a structuring condition of everyday life, shaped by rent inflation, displacement, welfare retrenchment and intensified struggles over access to urban space. Within this context, far-right political parties and actors are increasingly politicising these dynamics, seeking to re-signify housing through exclusionary notions of property, order, and deservingness. Particular attention will be paid to how these narratives are articulated at the everyday scale, where housing conflicts operate as key sites for the production of political subjectivities and the reorganisation of common sense around crisis.

Housing is approached as a strategic terrain where broader processes of economic, social and political reconfiguration are materialised, contested and made intelligible in everyday life. Likewise, the far-right is understood not merely as an ideological formation or party-political phenomenon, but as a political project that takes shape within socio-spatial conflicts that seeks to reorganise common sense around crisis. In this direction, the research aims to contribute to a critical understanding of how far-right actors actively rearticulate material grievances into hegemonic projects centred on security, property and national belonging. At the same time, it aims to identify and analyse emerging antifascist practices within housing struggles, examining how grassroots organisations, tenants’ movements and migrant collectives contest exclusionary narratives and articulate alternative claims to housing grounded in social reproduction, care and solidarity. The fellowship will allow the project to further develop and critically discuss ongoing findings from Spain and the United Kingdom, while advancing an exploratory analysis of the German case.

Zum Profil von Ana Santamarina.

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.

Zum Profil von Elisa Greco

Marcel Stoetzler

The Concept of Racialization and the Dichotomy of Antisemitism and Racism

Das Projekt beschäftigt sich mit der Beziehung zwischen den Begriffen »Rassismus« und »Antisemitismus«. Antisemitismus kann als »eine Form des Rassismus« betrachtet werden (wie es in den meisten klassischen Studien zum Thema Rassismus üblich war), ohne ihn dabei als »ein Partikulares« unter den Rassismus als »das Allgemeine« zu subsumieren (und damit zu trivialisieren), solange »Rasse« in einer antiessentialistischen (oder antirealistischen) Weise als gesellschaftlicher Prozess der »Rassifizierung« verstanden wird (wie es antirassistische WissenschaftlerInnen erstmals in den 1980er Jahren vorschlugen). Um die Kritik des Antisemitismus wieder in das Studium und die Kritik des Rassismus einzubringen, muss ein breitgefächerteres Verständnis des Rassismus als einer gesellschaftlichen Form wiedergewonnen werden, das sich weder ausschließlich auf Farbcodes und den kolonialen Kontext ihrer Entstehung konzentriert noch die populistischen, scheinbar antihegemonialen oder »antielitären« Formen des Rassismus ignoriert.

Zum Profil von Marcel Stoetzler.

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.

Zum Profil von Bruna della Torre.

Gefördert durch die Otto Brenner Stiftung.