THE INSTITUTE OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS AT NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY INVITES YOU TO OUR SEMINAR
Everyday globalisation, everyday resistance? Austrian snapshots
Dr. Christian Karmer, The University of Nottingham
Wednesday, 16 April, 2008
16:00-17:30
George Eliot Building, ICAn room 219, Clifton Campus
Nottingham
Abstract
Presenting an analysis of recent developments, arguments and widely perceived and debated crises in Austria, this paper argues for a conceptualisation of its 'everyday cultures' as internally contested, locally negotiated, and decisively shaped by globalisation. The impact of the latter, it is shown, is experienced on the level of everyday practices, commodities, representations, and politics of inclusion/ exclusion. More accurately, the question as to how globalisation is seen to impact on the everyday and to manifest in local contexts is addressed through an analysis of a series of empirical snapshots: these concern anxieties and discussions about transnationally circulating commodities (such as cigarettes, water and food), shifting borders, representations of 'the stranger', and competing ideological reactions to immigration and cultural pluralism. The ensuing analysis reveals everyday cultures to be dynamic fields of disagreement that are intrinsically political and to be seen in their historical contexts. Thus locating Austria's much debated national identity politics in its wider social and political fields that comprise ideologically heterogeneous reactions to a period of rapid change and widely perceived dislocations, this discussion also addresses more general questions: first, about complex identity negotiations in localities affected by transnational dynamics and developments; and, second, about discourses of morality and solidarity articulated in opposition to market forces widely experienced as - in Karl Polanyi's seminal terminology - 'socially disembedding'.
Christian Karner is a lecturer in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, at the University of Nottingham, where he also co-organises the Identity, Citizenship and Migration Centre (ICMiC). His research focuses on the negotiation of religious, ethnic, national, and local identities to the backdrop of contemporary globalisation. His most recent publications include a series of articles on Austrian national identities as well as Ethnicity and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2007).
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