Projects and ongoing research

Extrem rechte Weltbilder haben in den vergangenen Jahren maßgeblichen Einfluss auf den gesellschaftlichen Diskurs in Deutschland genommen, und die Verstärkungsmechanismen digitaler und sozialer Medien erweitern das potenziell erreichbare Publikum für entsprechende Weltbilder enorm. Die „Neue Rechte“ hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, dieses Potenzial für sich zu nutzen, um (alte) nationalistische, menschenfeindliche und autoritäre Denkmuster in Gesellschaft und Politik wieder salonfähig zu machen. Doch wie genau funktioniert diese Diskursproduktion? Welche Themen greift die „Neue Rechte“ auf und wie bezieht sie sich auf aktuelle Themen wie Migration, Grenzen, Gesundheit oder Naturschutz? Welche Rolle kommt digitalen Medien und ihrer Tendenz zu multimodalen und affektbetonten Äußerungen zu? Diesen Fragen geht das Forschungsprojekt nach und erhebt dazu systematisch Äußerungen auf Blogs, Twitter und Youtube. Im Anschluss an Arbeiten in der Politischen Geographie zu Nationalismus, Identität und Popular Geopolitics, untersuchen wir Konstruktion räumlicher Identitäten und geopolitischer Leitbilder. Über die Inhalte sprachlicher Äußerungen hinaus betrachten wir zudem, wie Arrangements aus Text, Bild und Ton Emotionen und Affekte provozieren und analysieren die Resonanz und Reichweite rechter geopolitischer Leitbilder in digitalen Medien.

Wiertz T
Email: thilo.wiertz@geographie.uni-freiburg.de

DFG

Sand is not a resource that many people associate with conflicts. Accordingly, the increasing exploitation of sand due to processes of globalization is rarely the object of scientific and public debates. But despite the common perception that sand is neither rare nor precious, it has evolved into the most important building material and a scarce resource in many regions of the world, especially those characterized by rapid population increase and urbanization. In South-east Asia, a region marked by an intensive boom in the building sector, vast quantities of sand and gravel are used in the construction of buildings, infrastructure and land reclamations. Thereby, sand has developed into an increasingly valuable economic resource that is extracted extensively and traded over long distances. However, the expanding sand extraction remains not without consequences, but leads to massive ecological damages and conflicts with the affected sections of the population. The commodification of sand can be interpreted as part of larger processes of the marketization of natural resources which in human geography is discussed as “neoliberalization of nature” (Bakker 2010). Respective studies demonstrate that capitalist logics of resource exploitation often have negative social and ecological effects. At the same time, they argue that processes and mechanisms of neoliberalization or marketization play out differently in different contexts and produce heterogeneous and ambivalent effects. This project analyzes conflicts over the marketization of sand in Cambodia as a manifestation of capitalist market processes and their interactions with the materialities involved. Drawing on the Global Ethnography approach by Michael Burawoy (2000) and Anna Tsing (2005) and on ideas developed within the debate on New Materialism (Bakker 2010; Mattissek und Wiertz 2014), the project applies a set of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze three main research questions: (1) Which global and regional factors influence the constitution and transformation of the Southeast Asian sand market, its respective structural conditions, trading routes and relations? (2) What role do actors play that are involved in the establishment of sand markets or protest and mobilize against the extraction and trade of sand? How are their respective strategies and practices affected by multi-scale influences and networks? (3) How do geological, biophysical (non-human) and social processes and entities of the sand-market interact and how do they shape the marketization of sand?

Prof. Dr. Annika Mattissek; Robert John
Email: annika.mattissek@geographie.uni-freiburg.de; robert.john@geographie.uni-freiburg.de

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)