Department Activities
FORUM FOR DEMOCRACY RESEARCH
"My paranoia is not without reason"
Enduring fear
Cultures of work
A lime kiln as an industrial monument
ACT!V!SM in memory and digital ethnography
A lime kiln as an industrial monument (Ö1 program on the Rösselmühle)
On the 2023/2024 master's study project: Ö1 broadcast by Jonathan Scheucher on Austria's technical monuments from October 7, 2023.
The radio program talks on industrial monuments such as the Rösselmühle mill with its two 40-metre-high silo towers in the middle of Graz, where grain was milled until 2014. The new main owner, a housing cooperative, wants to build apartments on the site. Several citizens' initiatives and a group of students led by cultural anthropologist Katharina Eisch-Angus from the University of Graz are fighting to preserve the mill buildings and revitalize it as a socio-cultural center.
ACT!V!SM IN MEMORY AND DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY
1.-2. September 2023, Volkshaus Graz
In light of multiple crises and increasing societal insecurity and uncertainty, anti-democratic and populist movements are on the rise. At the same time, civil society protesters raise their voices ever louder, on a local as much as global scale. Whilst activism and protest are directed towards the future, collective images of the past still play important roles; as imaginations of (lost) resources of place and belonging they guide actions or provide ideological-argumentative blueprints for populist ressentiments, identity politics and war.
These ambivalent melanges of (un)democratisation and conflict are shaped, multiplied and expedited in social media bubbles and virtual realities, in emancipatory activism or infectious fear narratives and hate. In so doing, they challenge the expertise of Empirical Cultural Analysis, Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology in new ways.
This interdisciplinary symposium, held on September 1st and 2nd, 2023 not only enquires the “What” but also the “How” of research and societal impact. How can ethnographic methodology embrace these rapidly changing modes of perception and articulation? And how can we trace
the tracks of social experience and cultural memory in conflicting discourses and find our way to dialogue and a new form of societal understanding?
Work cultures: Critical ethnographic studies and reports
The two-semester study project (2020/2021) focused on forms of dissolution of boundaries and subjectivation of ways of working and living under post-Fordist, neoliberal conditions. On the basis of ethnographic studies and with a focus on the perspective of the actors, data was to be obtained in various fields of work for an interpretation of current developments. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic combined with comprehensive lockdowns and very strict contact restrictions made the project work extremely difficult. However, in conversations and interviews with stakeholders and isolated observations of work processes, it was still possible to obtain ethnographic data in the summer of 2020, which was analyzed for its impact on the lives of the stakeholders. From these "ethnographies of proximity" (Götz), critical reports were conceived in the second semester of the project, which, with the support of Walther Moser (a dedicated radio journalist from Radio Helsinki Graz), could be cast into three very listenable, approx. 30-minute radio broadcasts. The project can be considered very successful in that all three topics covered in the radio broadcasts ultimately resulted in very successful master's theses.
