Between Exclusion, Integration, and Inclusion - On the Practical Limitations, Conditions, and Possibilities of Alterity-Politics in Chemnitz

• Applicant: Dr. Felix Hoffmann
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 430609777

With the refugee-protection crisis of 2015 in Germany, the question of how the integration and participation of refugees and migrants can be achieved or if it is desirable at all, is highly contested. Resistance against a pluralizing society resulted in violent outbursts in Chemnitz in 2018. However, there are also strong networks of civil society actors, politicians, and the local administration to be observed who struggle to promote inclusive and thus participatory alterity-politics. These actors have been largely ignored by the media and academia. The project is focussing the local conflict-dynamics, asking for the practice-logical limitations, conditions, and possibilities of inclusive alterity politics in conflictual relation with various forms of identity-based politics in Chemnitz. An innovative analytical approach of logics of practice in conflict between combat, competition, and mutually response-able polylogue will be applied. The working-hypothesis focusses the practice-logical weakness of alterity-politics in conflictual relation with identity-based politics: Aggressive identitarian, governmental integration politics as well as emancipative identity-politics can be practiced one-sidedly by engaging others (or being engaged) into bordering, combatant, and competitional relations. Alterity-politics by contrast requires a voluntary and mutual questioning of socio-cultural identifications from the start, in debordering practices of mutually response-able dialogue. In order to provide in-depth data on the various conflict-dynamics, a multidimensional methodology of multi-sited-ethnography will be deployed. Participant observation will begin in the various private, public, political, and administrative networks and everyday activities of organized civil society, which supports and collaborates with refugees and migrants. Here, mainly conditions and possibilities of inclusive alterity-politics will be observed. I will also approach political contact zones, where proponents and opponents of integration-matters engage each other. Here, mainly limitations of inclusive alterity-politics will be observed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Heidrun Friese; Dr. Marcus Nolden