Papers by Alexander Harder
Patterns of Prejudice, 2023
Harder’s article investigates how changes in working and living conditions are experienced by wor... more Harder’s article investigates how changes in working and living conditions are experienced by workers and how these changes create the conditions of acceptabilityfor right-wing politics. Drawing on qualitative interviews, mappings, questionnaires and fieldwork with workers in two retail workplaces in southern and eastern Germany, it outlines processes of logistificationthat impact workers’routines of labour and social reproduction: that is, their everyday lives. Respondents testify to an intensification and isolation of labour as well as a general scarcity of resources for social reproduction and powerlessness to influence the changes. Their work environments demand continuous adaptation to new technologies and management strategies. These experiences are shaped by a metanarrative of societal decline that appears to lie beyond the workers’control. Nostalgia—a romanticized imagination of the past—and reclusivity—apreference for privacy and suspicion of the public—emerge as responses to the perceived decline of their surroundings. They can constitute elements that far-right parties articulate against migration and towards authoritarian politics.
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Ethnicities, 2021
This article introduces the concept of cultures of rejection as a framing device to investigate c... more This article introduces the concept of cultures of rejection as a framing device to investigate conditions of acceptability of authoritarian populism among workers in Germany and Austria. After situating the concept in the current scholarly debate on right-wing populism and discussing its main theoretical points of reference, we offer an analysis focusing on experiences of crisis and transformation. Two elements of cultures of rejection are discussed in depth: the rejection of racialised and/or culturalised 'unpro-ductive' others; and the rejection of the public sphere, linked to the emergence of a 'shielded subjectivity'. These articulations of rejection are then discussed as related to two dimensions of a crisis of authority: the crisis of state or political authority in the field of labour and the economy; and the crisis of a moral order, experienced as decline in social cohesion. In conclusion, we identify possible avenues for further research, demonstrating the productivity of the conceptual framework of cultures of rejection.
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Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021
This article offers a collectively developed analysis of the Covid-19 crisis as it relates to con... more This article offers a collectively developed analysis of the Covid-19 crisis as it relates to contemporary cultures of rejection, i.e. the socio-cultural conditions in which authoritarian and right-wing populist politics thrive, in Europe. We explore how the pandemic and its management reinforces, transforms and/oroverrides existing antagonisms and institutes new ones in Serbia, Croatia,Austria, Germany and Sweden. We discuss how the Covid-19 crisis affects the rise of new statisms; gendered patterns of social reproduction; mobility and migration; digital infrastructures; and new political mobilizations
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Papers by Alexander Harder