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POPULISM in CENTRAL and EASTERN EUROPE

Sabine Volk

ESR 4: The politics of memory in the post-socialist city (Jagiellonian University)

Sabine’s research project explores far-right populist politics of memory as well as the ritualization of counter-hegemonic protest in post-socialist eastern Germany. Specifically, she studies how the Dresden-based “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (PEGIDA) mobilize historical memories in the context of the thirtieth anniversaries of the 1989 East German ‘Peaceful Revolution’ and the 1990 German Reunification.

Sabine is a doctoral fellow of the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) and a member of the Working Group on Memory and Populism associated with the Memory Studies Association (MSA).

Prior to her PhD, Sabine obtained two MA’s in European Studies: one from the Erasmus Mundus Programme of Excellence ‘Euroculture’ and one from the College of Europe. Previous places of study and research include Tübingen, Groningen, Strasbourg, Indianapolis and Warsaw.

Sabine is supervised by Zdzisław Mach and Krzysztof Kowalski at the Jagiellonian University and Haris Dajč at the University of Belgrade.

Contact:

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @SabineDVolk

Work in Progress:

2020: “How do movements survive? Far-right PEGIDA as a protest ritual”

2020: “To clap or not to clap? A methodological reflection on ethnographic approaches to the study of the far right”

Academic publications:

forthcoming (with Manès Weisskircher): “PEGIDA”, in The Routledge Handbook on Non-Violent Extremism, ed. William Allchorn & Elisa Orofino. London and New York: Routledge, 2021.

forthcoming: “Resisting Dictatorship? Populist Memory Politics and Collective Action Framing in the Far-right PEGIDA Movement”, in European Politics and Society, part of a special issue on “Far-right Memory Politics”, ed. Lars Rensmann, Piero Tortola & Stefan Couperus.

forthcoming: “Saving the Abendland? Ideas of Europe in German Far-Right Politics”, in Journal of European Studies, part of a special issue on “European Heritage”, ed. Margriet van der Waal, Astrid van Weyenberg & Sabine Volk.

2022: “Contested memories of the East German peaceful revolution:Appeals to 1989 by the populist PEGIDA movement”, in Contested memories of 1989: Geopolitics, memories and societies in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Nicolas Maslowski & Kinga Torbicka. Peter Lang, 2022.

2021: “Die rechtspopulistische PEGIDA in der COVID-19-Pandemie: Virtueller Protest für ‘unsere Bürgerrechte'”, in Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, https://doi.org/10.1515/fjsb-2021-0020

2021: “Political Performances of Control During COVID-19: Controlling and Contesting Democracy in Germany”, in Frontiers in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.654069

2020: “Germany: Is the COVID-19 Pandemic Weakening the Far Right?”, in: Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic by the Radical Right: Scapegoating, Conspiracy Theories and New Narratives, ed. Tamir Bar-On & Bàrbara Molas, Hannover: ibidem, pp. 57-60, https://www.ibidem.eu/de/responses-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-by-the-radical-right.html

2020: “‘Wir sind das Volk!’ Representative claim-making and populist style in the Pegida movement’s discourse”, in German Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2020.1742325.

2020: “‘No borders, no nations’ or ‘Fortress Europe’? How European citizens remake European borders”, in European Studies and Europe: Twenty Years of Euroculture, ed. Janny de Jong, Marek Neuman, Senka Stanivukovic-Neuman, and Margriet van der Waal, Göttingen University Press, https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2019-1225.

2020: “Commemoration at the Extremes: A Field Report from Dresden 2020”, in Cultures of History Forum,https://www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de/debates/germany/commemoration-at-the-extremes-a-field-report-from-dresden-2020/.

2019: “Speaking for ‘the European people’? How the transnational alliance Fortress Europe constructs a populist counter-narrative to European integration”, in Politique Européenne 66, pp. 120-149, https://doi.org/10.3917/poeu.066.0120.

2017: “Refugee encampments in Calais: Between jungle and city”, in Eikasia. Revista de Filosofía, no. 77, http://revistadefilosofia.com/numero77.htm.

Blog posts:

Conferences (selection):

  • 08/2020: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2020 (virtual), as paper presenter
  • 11/2019: Europe ’89: The Promise Recalled – 30thEuropean Meeting of Cultural Journals (Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, Berlin), as participant
  • 10/2019: Social Movements and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe: Historical Legacy and Current Trends (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), as paper presenter
    10/2019: Remembering 1989: Actors, Approaches and Audiences (Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena), as paper presenter
  • 09/2019: 1989’s Contested Legacies: The Challenging of Ideological, Institutional and (Geo)Political Heritage (University of Warsaw), as paper presenter
  • 09/2019: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2019 (Uniwersytet Wroclawski, Wroclaw), as paper presenter
  • 07/2019: Association française des sciences politiques (AFSP), conférence annuelle (Sciences Po Bordeaux), as paper presenter
  • 06/2019: Memory Studies Association (MSA) Annual Conference (Universidad Complutense, Madrid), as paper presenter
  • 06/2019: Council for European Studies (CES) Annual Conference (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid), as paper presenter
  • 03/2019: German Historical Institute Workshop on democracy and populism (Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris), as paper presenter
  • 08/2018: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2018 (Universität Hamburg), as paper presenter
  • 06/2018: European Studies and Europe: Twenty Years of Euroculture (Uniwersytet Jagiellonski Kraków), as paper presenter